118 Quotes About Pretense

I don't want to be an insufferable pretentious "artist". I just want to fucking write. To create. And to to hear the stories of the people around the globe who go, "yeah, okay, I've been there, man.

Most sane human beings’ chances of being alive in a thousand years’ time are a hundred times higher than their chances of being sincerely happy for at least ten consecutive days.

everyone would just keep on keeping on, pretending that nothing much had happened, and the pretense would become habitual, until, eventually, the lie would seem more real than the truth.

In some cases, it is not the person that has changed, but their decision not to be themselves.

How comfortable if, from a position of power, we think, although comfort is the most dangerous thing—it confuses value with power, vision with illusion, (confessions don't help) and that is how a mistake is born. We know much about people and wars—or we think we do; and despite all these words we know, something terrible always happens to remind us of our blindness.

It is not a matter of knowledge, it is not a matter of power, but rather a powerful eye blind before the obvious, offering an illusion that even unrecognized pretense can be sold as a recognized solution; and, as with the dying pretense, only what is real survives: pretense cannot sustain blind power; courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat.

But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming-everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else's that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive.

A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.

Most if not all sexually active people do not really love having sex; they merely love experiencing an orgasm every now and then.