118 Quotes About Pretense

Often it is the poor who recognize emptiness before the rest of us—and for obvious reasons. While I am not suggesting that poverty predisposes people to some form of righteousness, I have seen how their circumstances often free them from much of the pretense that our relative privilege affords us. So while the poor are not godlier on the basis of their poverty, they are often at least more authentic in their brokenness, and thus, perhaps, closer to honestly recognizing what true emptiness is.

Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?' ButO O O O that Shakespeherian Rag--It's so elegantSo intelligent

I act through the day like you don’t matter anymore, till my tired bones refuse to carry it to bed. And there the pretense lies crestfallen as tears soaking the pillow, till morning makes it invisible again.

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.

I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.

I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not - to smile sweetly all the time - just to get recognition and love. I won't play the whore for anyone, least of all for journalists. I can't do that. I want to be loved, yes, but the way I am and not the way people would like me to be. I have to be allowed to be myself.

I prefer open hostility to the poisonous silence of supposed neutrality.

Adopting the language of a pretense only serves to ease participation in it.

She looks at me and smiles in that brisk efficient way. A modern professional smile. the kind of smile that never existed before, say, the telephone.