..we wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes- this debt we pay to human guile; with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.
He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on her door and ask for it back.
I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.
Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks. Life itself had become a secret affair.
Now if I appear to be carefree it's only to camouflage my sadness. In order to keep my pride I try to cover the hurt with a show of gladness.
Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don't notice. Pretty soon, if you're a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.
She knows too well what it's like to tamp down your natural inclinations, to force a smile when you feel numb....The expression of emotion does not come naturally, so yo learn to fake it. To pretend. To display an empathy you don't really feel. And so it is that you learn to pass, if you're lucky, to look like everyone else, even though you're broken inside.
Boredom is a mask frustration wears.
Masquerading the heart is the height of haunting souls.
She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.
We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.
There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.
I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.
