Quotes About Pretense

A lot of the characters I play seem to be lying to themselves in some way. They maybe present themselves as confident or good at something, but in reality, it's clear that they don't know what they're talking about.

Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?" "Not likely!" Howl yelled. "I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.

reality, the picnickers were sweltering beneath their clothes, the champagne was warm, and if anyone had thought to take their shoes off they would have had to walk through goose droppings. Still, they were willing to feign jollity, in the hope that their pretense would encourage the real thing.

The progressive pretense is that these people, who have created virtually nothing, are actually the real creators of the nation's wealth.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. Everything enters something else. My days spill into light-years. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.

Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

Patta's expression seemed cordial enough, though from past experience Brunetti knew this was meaningless: vipers liked to bask on rocks in the sunshine, did they not?

In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equal in every respect but money, which is simply not true.

At first I thought they were playing to an

The scariest monsters have the best masks.

Skepticism is certainly a beneficial tool, to the extent that it yields a dialectic of ideas that can progress toward empirical resolution of difficult issues, but at present it is too commonly an attitude, a well-cultivated academic pretense, that leads to the neglect of important problems.

Three months later, I was playing the role of grieving widow. Lyle had been caught in flagrante with his paramour when they were incinerated in their love nest. I earned bushels of sympathy from friends and acquaintances, who, after a suitable time, hinted that I must have known something was up; everyone else did. I played the shocked and unsuspecting wife role to a level I thought deserved a Tony or even an Oscar.

You've loved with intensity and passion, and have learned to hide your heartache, learned to press your handkerchief back into your pocket and pretend that you are okay.

Propaganda is necessarily false, when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness-and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretense and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with that fact.

I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. And so I made pleasant little noises that showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem.

In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity.

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

It's hard to pretend to be born without causing offense.

Filth!' Ignatious shouted, spewing wet popcorn over rows. 'How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.

Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.

I stay away from churches in which I feel like I have to pretend I'm a better person than I am. That sort of thing moves my faith backwards.