a man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.
Albert Camus • The Myth of Sisyphus (Vintage International)
Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
a man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.
Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personalit
... See moreFernando Pessoa • The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)
Man’s identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and precarious sense of permanence. For this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. Social convention encourages the fixity of the idea because the very usefulness of symbols depends up
... See moreAlan W. Watts • The Way of Zen
the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live.
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. —Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
Meghan O'Rourke • The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and di
... See moreErnest Becker • The Denial of Death
All that we know is our own impression, and all that we are is an exterior impression, a melodrama in which we, the self-aware actors, are also our own spectators, our own gods by permission of some department or other at City Hall.
Fernando Pessoa • The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)
A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He’s missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.
Mary Karr • The Art of Memoir
Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in th
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