But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

You see, I have always found it difficult to understand that in fact one can only be oneself. Who else could you be? Changeability and hypocrisy and performance are parts of who we are. And what is empirical reality, anyway?

a man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.

So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,” said Cary Grant, “until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”