Masking True Self Quotes

We're actors in our lives, pretendin' to be who we want people to think we are.

I was pretending to be a fake, a caricature, which is something I'm not, and I was doing it out of desperation and scarcity so I could provide for my family.

Every African-American I know has two faces. There's the face that we have for ourselves and the face we put on for white America for the places we have to get to.

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.

I don't really have a realistic life. Anyway, I am a schizophrenic so there two persons in me. Because I am the person I put on for the public and the person that I am really . . . deep inside me. So I have to cover it all up with . . . glamour and all that bullshit . . . make-up . . . glamour, dresses, color, etc., etc. . . . trying to hide a very . . . fragile person, really . . . very vulnerable to attack.

Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.

Our persona was not created by accident; it was created in order to camouflage the parts of ourselves we deemed the most undesirable and to overcompensate for what we believe to be our deepest flaws. What persona are you hiding behind?

I've spent so much time in that makeup that I'm now unrecognizable. The business doesn't know who I am.

I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my characters, never realising that David Jones might be behind it.

Tell that to the BTK killer,” I said. “He was a churchgoer, raised two kids, married, and resisted the urge to kill for decades. He was a person, but he was a monster, too

Nothing is so tiresome to one's self, as well as so odious to others, as disguise and affectation.

Look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under it.

When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that's a little something extra between me and them. It's like the Laurence Dunbar poem "We Wear the Mask."

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

The hypocrite who always plays one and the same part ceases at last to be a hypocrite.

No one is who they pretend to be

It is easier to pretend to be what you are not than to hide what you really are; but he that can accomplish both has little to learn in hypocrisy.

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false

I was one of those kids who kept trying on different skins in high school. I was very afraid to be myself around all of these kids, to really reveal any part of myself that was true, so I would try on different skins, try on different masks, hoping I'd hit on one that was cool or quirky or interesting enough that suddenly I would be OK.

These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

But being in the closet uniquely assisted me in politics. From my first run for the state legislature until my election as governor, all too often I was not leading but following my best guess at public opinion.

We all in real life put on these masks - we don't swear when we're around certain people... When we come home, when you're on your own I'm sure you're really different than when you're with your boss.

Are we not like the actor of old times, who wore his mask so long his face took its likeness?