Mike White Quotes

We create the illusions we need to go on. And one day, when they no longer dazzle or comfort, we tear them down, brick by glittering brick, until we are left with nothing but the bright light of honesty. The light is liberating. Necessary. Terrifying. We stand naked and emptied before it. And when it is too much for our eyes to take, we build a new illusion to shield us from its relentless truth.

Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.

It's only in uncertainty that we're naked and alive.

When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else

Everyone is broken a little, I think, and the most broken of all are those who pretend they are not.

It is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky..but to express oneself honestly not lying to oneself, now that my friend is very hard to do

I realize that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

They say that the truth will set you free But then again, so will a lie... It depends if you're trying to get to the promised land Or if you're just trying to get by.

When I turn the lights out, when I close my eyes, reality overcomes me, I'm living a lie.

Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.

Honesty is often the best policy, but sometimes the appearance of it is worth six of it.

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemerton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just—like, a person.

A warrior is not about perfection or victory or invulnerability. He's about absolute vulnerability.

I feel bare. I didn't realize I wore my secrets as armor until they were gone and now everyone sees me as I really am.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.

He looked less handsome without the smile and glow in his eyes, but he also seemed more real. Being real will get me into trouble faster than any amount of charm.