Taylor Goldsmith Quotes

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.

My love affairs were more often about the fantasy than the actual person I was involved with.

We are never so ridiculous through what we are as through what we pretend to be.

A lot of my characters are people who are, in essence, lying to themselves. They present one thing, when in reality they're another thing. Maybe they're not as tough or as cool as they want to be.

People forget who they are; they always remain with an identity which is not the real self. It is just a projected self which does not exist, but they identify with this projected self appearance.

She touched his hand for the last time. "Oh, Karim, that we have already done. But always there was a problem between us. How can I explain? I wasn't me, and you weren't you. From the very beginning to the very end, we didn't see things. What we did--we made each other up." p. 382

Some people fake their death, I'm faking my life.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

I loved something I made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn't see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.

He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending,wearing masks and losing themselves in the process.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

I've been living a lie all my life.

I felt my whole life was a facsimile of a life.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

What is a movie star? It is an illusion. It was everything I ever wanted to be, but it became a kind of shell, non? It was what made me famous and got me women. But it wasn't real.

No woman ever falls in love with a man unless she has a better opinion of him than he deserves.

I try not to kid myself. You know, I don't mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous.

If you begin to think you're something you're not, you're looking in the wrong mirror.

I used to be a hopeless romantic - I fell in love with everyone I went out with.

I was in love with the idea of love, so I created elaborate fictions for my relationships - fictions that allowed me to believe that what any given paramour and I shared looked a lot like love.

I've been pretending to be a man that I'm not my entire life. I've been pretending to be strong when I felt weak, confident when I felt insecure and tough when really I was hurting. And I can tell you right now that it is exhausting.

I'm not a real person. I'm a legend.

The man that thinks he loves his mistress for her own sake is mightily mistaken.

If you're trying to be something you're not, you can see right through it.

It was really tiring always pretending to be someone else. Not my life, not my real name, nothing.