Jane Welsh Carlyle Quotes

I've always been a clown trapped in a leading man's body.

Like most people, I have a dark side, but because of roles I played early on, people tend not to guess that.

As I get older, I'm sort of fascinated with the idea of somebody who could construct an entire persona for themselves - one that was really, in a lot of ways, fundamentally at odds with who they really were as a person.

How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?

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.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

They talk like angels but they live like men.

Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.

When I was in college I was accused of being a goody two-shoes. But every goody two-shoes has a bad side.

My wife would say I'm more Hyde than Jekyll!

As a general thing, I've always been drawn to characters who appear to be one thing on the surface, but are actually something else underneath.

I think I appear very innocent and soft, but I'm actually very dark and edgy. It's a weird dichotomy.

'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.

He looks like a choirboy and bites like a shark.

People pretend to be nice; people pretend to be smooth and polite and everything, but this is only an appearance because the way we're built as human beings is only in paradox and contradictions.

I'm not a monster; I'm a white rabbit.

The depiction of the exterior as opposed [to] what you're feeling inside is always so different that it's impossible to know what is right.

True conviction of sin--how difficult it is, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into, our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions.

One face to the world, another at home - makes for misery.

She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart.

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

It crosses my mind that Cinna's calm and normal demeanor masks a complete madman.

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.