Pat Barker Quotes

You have to pretend to be cool, which I never am.

When you become a slave to a public persona and don't feel comfortable without it, it becomes a shield, and it shouldn't come at the expense of your self-worth.

But I've always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she's just as tormented and messed up as everybody else.

I want to be able to wake up and feel like, 'Eh, I feel like wearing this!' Or talking to that person. It's so much more work to have to stay in that box to fit in, 'Mean Girls' style.

We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves.

That ain't me, that ain't my face. It wasn't even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn't even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

I was trying to be this person who is cool, eternally rocking.

I think behind closed doors people behave differently no matter what period we're looking at, because people have to stand up straight in public but can slouch behind closed doors - can you imagine wearing those corsets?

For a long time, I would go out of my way to have a personal appearance on the verge of an insane person, because it was closer to how I felt, but I looked so dumb. So, I just stopped. It was like, 'I'm just going to look like a banker.'

I think I always resented the fact that people thought I was trying to entertain them with my multifaceted, chameleonlike character changes. Although I liked doing that, I wasn't out to fool people and say 'Guess which one is me.'

Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it's necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.

Scratch the surface of what's socially normal. I suppose in some way all of us have something we display to the public and things we feel too ashamed of or uncomfortable with to reveal to other people.

You get to an age where you get tired of hiding behind whatever people think is correct.

For a while, I tried to masquerade as somewhat of a hippie because I was under the impression that was the kind of guy girls would like. I was pretty unsuccessful because I liked the idea of camping more than actually camping. I did go to a Grateful Dead concert, but I was pretty bored.

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

We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.

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

I'm not out here trying putting on an act like I'm crazy. In my opinion, everyone else is crazy. They're the ones who put on an act for you, doing what they're told in front of the camera.

It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

I never say never about a lot of things. Whatever you want, then more power to you. If someone feels they have to live up to a certain image, then I can kind of understand that pressure because I'm considered to be one of those images, and I know how unreal they are.