Roger Rosenblatt Quotes

I am not the same man you found that day! The monster you've created has returned, to kill you!

There used to be a real me, but I had it surgically removed.

To cultivate an English accent is already a departure away from what you are.

Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.

You can't become another person if you're not self-aware.

When you traffic in monsters, that's the risk you run, that you'll find one too monstrous to stomach.

It's very odd to observe someone else taking your identity into their own hands and getting it all wrong. I don't think most people will ever get to experience how truly weird it is.

The one thing I know, everyone respects the true person and everyone's not true with themselves.

Sometimes you can get so far in yourself that you don't know who you are.

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

I didn't want to whisper and giggle about [puberty] anymore. I felt incredibly self-conscious. I felt like I was losing myself, and I was losing who I was. And that really scared me.

This inhuman place makes human monsters.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

When did we stop being people, being human?

One doesn't lose a self, like a pair of gloves or a pine. We learn and change, or we harden into stone.

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.

That person I was when I was a lot younger is not who I am today.

Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

If you've got great parents, once you grow up and have to live by yourself, you're going to create some fake self as you get comfortable wherever you are.

The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

People confuse the person and the part.