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Mask Quotes

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Mask Quotes

“I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.”

“Of all individuals, the hated, the shunned, and the peculiar are arguably most themselves. They wear no masks whatsoever in order to be accepted and liked; they do seem most guarded, but only by their own hands: as compared to the populace, they are naked.”

“The essence of true love is mutual recognition-two individuals seeing each other as they really are. We all know that the usual approach is to meet someone we like and put our best self forward, or even at times a false self, one we believe will be more appealing to the person we want to attract. When our real self appears in its entirety, when the good behavior becomes too much to maintain or the masks are taken away, disappointment comes. All too often individuals feel, after the fact-when feelings are hurt and hearts are broken-that it was a case of mistaken identity, that the loved one is a stranger. They saw what they wanted to see rather than what was really there.”

“Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...”

“And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself. But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...”

“There’s no such thing as a good or bad person: there are just people who have each been or seem to have been good or bad to you, someone, or some people, thus far.”

“He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by. On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate's face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other's skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath.”

“Dad rests his hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye. "Keep making me proud, Eduardo." These tiny moments of affection are how he's trapped me over the years. The pat on the back after I threatened to have Peter McCall drowned if he ever used his water power in front of me. How Dad bandaged my hand after I beat down Harry Gardner. The praise after Rhys Stone was killed. I've attacked an entire community of people because I got some fatherly love from it. But every time I think about my mother, I know she wouldn't have raised me to be so hateful. I need to change and be someone she would've been proud to call her son. It's hard when there's so much blood on my hands already. Sometimes I think about how I would rather be dead than keep hiding my monstrosities behind this mask.”

“Someone once told me, ‘The brightest smiles bring us the greatest of joys. The loudest laughter is like a grand orchestra, and the most beautiful faces are covered in makeup, because we are okay, and everything is fine. The brightest smile is like a bandage, it looks okay, but inside the wound still festers, asking to be cut off. They say laughter is the best medicine. And the mask is our way of making ourselves look more beautiful, to reduce our flaws and hide our scars. When the smiles fade away and the bandage is ripped off; when the laughter is silenced and the music stops, when the makeup is washed away, and our mask fades, we find that we were never truly okay.”

“In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.”