Mask Man Quotes & Sayings

I think it's all a facade. I think you wear a mask to show us, the media and the public, how you want to be perceived, but behind closed doors and deep down inside lies the real Shin Shaojin. A man who is so egotistical, maniacal, and so power driven that he would sell his soul to the highest bidder if it meant getting to the top. — Justin Bienvenue

But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself? — George Steiner

I had a Spider-man costume when I was about three, and I lost the mask. So I went to the underwear drawer and put a pair of red pants on my head. My dad came home and just laughed, and I ran into my room and burst into tears. — Emun Elliott

Finally he said that in his first years of darkness his dreams had been vivid beyond all expectation and that he had come to thirst for them but that dreams and memories alike had faded one by one until there were no more. Of all that once had been no trace remained. The look of the world. The faces of loved ones. Finally even his own person was lost to him. Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again. I can't remember the world of light, he said. It has been so long. The world is a fragile world. Ultimately, what can be seen is what endures. What is true ...
In my first years of blindness, I thought it was a form of death. I was wrong. Losing one's sight is like falling in a dream. You think there's no bottom to this abyss. You fall and fall. Light recedes. Memory of light. Memory of the world. Of your own face. Of the grim-faced mask. — Cormac McCarthy

... He was a bad courtier and painted an ambiguous picture entitled La Menzogna or Falsehood, to show what he felt about the need for dissimulation to achieve success; a man holds up a mask to indicate to his companion that he must adopt it if he wants to make progress at court... ... The clear message was that Rosa was not prepared to demean himself in that way. — Jonathan Scott

A man is never more himself than when he is alone ... That is when the mask comes off. Shut the door, and the persona drops away. Alone, you reveal your soul. — J. Kenner

A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face. — Alexandre Dumas

When the pope sits on the chamber pot to shit, does he believe in his own infallibility? Does not every imposter occasionally recognize his own hairy, homely humanity? Perhaps not; worn long enough, sometimes the Mask of Authority becomes the man. Even looking in a mirror, he will see the sacred Mask and not his own ordinary human face. — Robert Anton Wilson

Because i have been a man of order, my efforts were directed towards the attainment of a real, not a deceptive, freedom...I have always considered despotism of any kind a symptom of weakness. Where it appears, it condemns itself; most intolerably where it appears behind the mask of advancing the cause of liberty. — Kissinger Henry

Pain wears no mask .it makes man humble. — Kishore Bansal

Everywhere man is in disguise! Who is who is unknown! Try to enter the mask and find out who the man inside really is! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget. — Fernando Pessoa

You must marry ugly man," I said. "Very fet." I held my arms out in front of me, indicating a giant belly. "He weeel make you heppy." I heard Mal snort beneath his mask. — Leigh Bardugo

The black mask, with its slittled forehead and thick, snoutlike breathing apparatus, covered the face of the man he knew as Kylo Ren. Once, he had known the face behind the mask. Once, he has known the man himself. Now, to Lor San Tekka, only the mask was left. Metal instead of a man. — Alan Dean Foster

To reach the farthest chamber of Lascaux, it's likely a man had to snuff out his light, lower himself down a shaft with a rope made of twisted fibers, and then rekindle his lamp in the dark so as to draw the woolly rhinoceros, the half horse, and the raging bison there. A long spear transfixes that bison, and entrails pour from its side. Beneath its front hooves lies the one painted man in all of Lascaux: prone, spindly wounded, disguised behind a bird mask. And below him, until its discovery in 196o, lay a spoon-shaped lamp carved of red sandstone ... Hold it again as it once was held, and the animals will emerge out of darkness as you pass. Nothing stays still. Shadows nestle in the cavities; a flicker of light across pale protruding rock turns a hoof or raises a head. One shape recedes as another emerges, and everything lingers in the imagination. — Jane Brox

Marry me, Thena, please.

I tried to sigh and would have managed it, had he left me enough air space. If he intended on kissing me like this a lot, I was going to need a nose-mask and oxygen tanks in the future.
Yes, I said reluctantly, I think I must.
It was perfectly clear to me that the poor man had become disturbed in his reason, and in those conditions it would be cruel and unfair to send him to space alone, much less when space had become so dangerous. I must marry him, just to make sure he stayed safe. It was the least I could do, since I was fairly sure I'd started him on this road by trying to garrotte him and reducing his supply of oxygen to the
brain.
Yes, yes, you must, he said. It gets very boring in the Cathouse, without anyone to kick me.
Poor man. Madder than a broomer hopped up on oblivium. — Sarah A. Hoyt

The paper was made in Bohemia," I said. "Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence - 'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts. — Arthur Conan Doyle

In a corner of my soul there hides a tiny frightened child, who is frightened by a corner where there lingers something wild. — Shaun Hick

I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October. — Victor LaValle

Sirius's gaunt face broke out into the first true smile Harry had seen upon it. The difference it made was startling, as though a person ten years younger were shining through the starved mask; for a moment he was recognizable as the man who had laughed at Harry's parents' wedding. — J.K. Rowling

I could only nod as emotions rolled in like a destructive storm. This was it. It was over. My incredible time with this beautiful talented man was up. I had to clench my teeth and swallow hard to mask the loss that threatened to overcome my calm exterior. I was holding on for dear life then he said two words with pure tranquility. — Nicole Castro

We must be quite the sight. Raffe in his red mask with his demon wings spread out in all their scythe-edged glory. A scrawny teenage Daughter of Man brandishing an archangel sword. And a little girl stitched-up to look and behave like a nightmare who is clutching a pair of angel wings. — Susan Ee

Nothing is more irreligious than to persecute the seekers of truth in order to keep up absurdities and superstitions of bygone ages. Nothing is more inhuman than the commission of 'devout cruelty' under the mask of love of God and man. — Kaiten Nukariya

A man is bound to make for himself in this world, that fortune which heaven had refused him at his birth. — Alexandre Dumas

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of
its features from behind the unreasoning mask. — Herman Melville

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to. — Paul Valery

Watch a man in times of adversity to discover what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off. — Titus Lucretius Carus

I was Pac-Man. It was the worst costume ever. You would expect a big round suit, but it was just a mask and a smock with a maze on it. — Ray Toro

The man screamed, and screamed behind his mask, and the Bloody-Nine laughed, and twisted the blade. Logen might have pitied him, but Logen was far away and the Bloody-Nine had no more pity in him than the winter. Less even. He stabbed, and cut, and cut, and smiled, and the screams bubbled and died, and he let the corpse drop to the cold stones. His fingers were slick with blood and he wiped it on his clothes, on his arms, on his face - just as it should be. — Joe Abercrombie

Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption 'Reproof of curiosity. — Angela Carter

From Secret Man

The man of autumn,
Behind its melancholy mask,
Will laugh in the brown grass,
Will shout from the tower's rim. — Wallace Stevens

No race is more adept than humans at weaving a mask of excuses, at ultimately claiming good intent. And no race is more adept at believing its own claims. How many wars have been fought, man against man, with both armies espousing that god, a goodly god, was on their side and in their hearts? But — R.A. Salvatore

A drug dealer on Thirteenth Street who offers me crack and blindly I wave a fifty at him and he says "Oh, man" gratefully and shakes my hand, pressing five vials into my palm which I proceed to eat whole and the crack dealer stares at me, trying to mask his deep disturbance with an amused glare, and I grab him by the neck and croak out, my breath reeking, "The best engine is in the BMW 750iL, — Bret Easton Ellis

The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature — Graham Greene

It was not the mask I was afraid of ... but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself — John Fowles

Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear ... the situation is more serious: there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, & yet no man is alone. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of the soul. — W. Somerset Maugham

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit
or a mask. — William Hazlitt

Magnus? Magnus Bane?"
"That would be me." The man blocking the doorway was as tall and thin as a rail, his hair a crown of dense back spikes. Clary guessed from the curse of his sleepy eyes and the gold tone of his evenly tanned skin that he was part Asian. He wore jeans and a black shirt covered with dozens of metal buckles. His eyes were crusted with a raccoon mask of charcoal glitter, his lips painted a dark shade of blue. He raked a ring-laden hand through his spiked hair and regarded them thoughtfully. "Children of the Nephilim," he said. "Well, well. I don't recall inviting you. I must have been drunk. — Cassandra Clare

In the age of hyper technology and cookie crumbs, you can only trust a man in a mask. Everyone else has too much to lose. — Wayne Gladstone

I lie without a mask, thus I am an honest man. — Lionel Suggs

So, you play Batman at night, and fix-it man during the day?" His nose wrinkled in a way that was entirely too adorable for his tough guy demeanor. She didn't say a word about it though, knowing he'd never do it again if she pointed it out.

"Batman? Batman's a pathetic jelly donut. He's a little Richie Rich that prances 'round in fancy tights and dress up panties, too much of a wuss to do anythin' without a mask and a prepubescent scarecrow as a sidekick. — Amy Cook

The Great Man ... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone ... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar ... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am a man that finds Death beautiful. If I have lived a million lives before this one, I know that I have spent each one searching for Death. It's hard to be entranced by those who aren't your soulmate, which is I why I don't acknowledge those like her, but her. Our hearts are meant to join again. Our souls are meant to join again. I am a man that finds Death beautiful, for Death doesn't wear a mask or lie. She simply smiles, and takes the breath of life away ... — Lionel Suggs

It is a dreadful thing to wait and watch for the approach of death; to know that hope is gone, and recovery impossible; and to sit and count the dreary hours through long, long, nights - such nights as only watchers by the bed of sickness know. It chills the blood to hear the dearest secrets of the heart, the pent-up, hidden secrets of many years, poured forth by the unconscious helpless being before you; and to think how little the reserve, and cunning of a whole life will avail, when fever and delirium tear off the mask at last. Strange tales have been told in the wanderings of dying men; tales so full of guilt and crime, that those who stood by the sick person's couch have fled in horror and affright, lest they should be scared to madness by what they heard and saw; and many a wretch has died alone, raving of deeds, the very name of which, has driven the boldest man away.
("The Drunkard's Death") — Charles Dickens

Within a few months Mitch Bush, head veterinarian at the National Zoo, and David Wildt, a young reproductive physiologist working as a postdoctoral fellow in my laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, were on a plane bound for South Africa. Bush is a towering, bearded, giant of a man with a strong interest and acumen in exotic animal veterinary medicine, particularly the rapidly improving field of anesthetic pharmacology. Wildt is a slight and modest Midwestern farm boy, schooled in the reproductive physiology of barnyard animals. His boyish charm and polite shy demeanor mask a piercing curiosity and deep knowledge of all things reproductive. Bush and Wildt's expedition to the DeWildt cheetah breeding center outside Pretoria would ultimately change the way the conservation community viewed cheetahs forever. — Stephen J. O'Brien

Man, the mask of God, — Ken Wilber

Oh, what a miserable man you are! If you're wrong and he tries to bite me, I will be very upset with you, Mok. I will lay waste to your loins. I will make your eyes crossed so that everyone who looks at you and your silly mask will not be able to help but laugh. And I will think of other things, too, I assure you. — Steven Erikson

It pained her that a few hundred words in an also-ran newspaper could get her kicked out. That damned article.
And Rook.
Her sharpest agony. She had invested in this guy. Waited for this guy. Felt something for this guy that went beyond the bedroom ... or wherever else they took each other. Nikki did not give herself easily to a man, and this betrayal by Rook was why. Heat reflected on her answer at the oral boards about her greatest flaw and admitted her reply was a mask. Yes, her identification with her job was total. But her greatest flaw wasn't overinvestment in her career. It was her reticence to be vulnerable. Unarmed as she was-literally-she had been emotionally so with Rook.
That was the gut shot that had blown clean through her soul. — Richard Castle

There come a time, when good man must wear mask. — Johnny Depp

Only sometimes Sansa found it hard to tell where the man ended and the mask began. — George R R Martin

He watched her for her reaction, or possibly watched her just to watch, his eyes hooded by his lashes and his mouth impassive. A faceless man - such as the one she had dreamed of since she was a child - his identity not obscured by mist or flying sand or swirling dust, but by a mask he readily employed whenever he wished. As a shutter closed against a gale. Closed against her, no matter the impact of his words. He seemed to speak them against his will, just as he seemed to care for her against his will. — V.S. Carnes

Father's face was buried in early summer flowers. There was something gruesome about the utter freshness of those flowers. It was as though they were peering down into the bottom of a well. For a dead man's face falls to an infinite depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask; it falls so deep, indeed, that it can never be pulled back to the surface. A dead man's face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists. — Yukio Mishima

The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it. — Arthur Schopenhauer

PIETT: But truly, what man doth not wear a mask?
For all of us are masked in sone way --
Some choose sharp cruelty as their outward face,
Some put themselves behind a king's facade,
Some put on the disguise of arrogance,
But underneath our masks, are we not one?
Do not all wish for love, and joy, and peace?
And whether rebel or Imperial,
Do not our hearts all beat in time to make
The pounding rhythm of the galaxy? — Ian Doescher

Life as it proceeds reveals, cooly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that everyone possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. — Sadegh Hedayat

A man in Florida has been arrested for wearing a President Obama mask while robbing a McDonald's. To show you how good this guy's disguise was, instead of a holdup note he was reading from a teleprompter. — Jay Leno

The beast in man had lifted its mask and the time of euphemistic niceties and rationalizations was over. — Annette Dumbach

No one survived on the streets without a protective mask. No one survived naked. You had to have a role. You had to be "thug," "playa," "athlete," "gangsta," or "dope man." Otherwise, there was only one role left to you: "victim. — Jerry Heller

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; ... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all. — Soren Kierkegaard

The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the under-gardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man
square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes." "That's rather vague," said Sherlock Holmes. "My, it might be a description of Watson!" "It's true," said the inspector, with amusement. "It might be a description of Watson. — Arthur Conan Doyle

They agreed, without any prodding, without the shadows of obligation or compromise, on Barack Obama. At first, even though she wished America would elect a black man as president, she thought it impossible, and she could not imagine Obama as president of the United States; he seemed too slight, too skinny, a man who would be blown away by the wind. Hillary Clinton was sturdier. Ifemelu liked to watch Clinton on television, in her square trouser suits, her face a mask of resolve, her prettiness disguised, because that was the only way to convince the world that she was able. Ifemelu — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Wear the mask. Hide the man. Feel nothing. See everything. Move and kill. Move and kill. I am not a man. They are not men. — Pierce Brown

Be a man! Put on a mask. — Ljupka Cvetanova

I know that a man who tries to convert me to any cause
is actually at work on his own conversion,
unless he is looking for funds under the mask of some fancied nobility. — Ben Hecht

For all his orders and sneers, his commanding presence, and his intimidating always all-black ensemble, Vhalla saw something different. She simply saw someone who was lonely, someone who could likely count their friends on one hand, and perhaps wanted to one day use two hands. He was nothing like the man she first met, the man who wore a mask to meet palace expectations. — Elise Kova

All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime ... it is itself an absurd phenomenon. — Albert Camus

Evey Hammond: Who are you?
V: Who? Who is but the form following the function of what and what I am is a man in a mask.
Evey Hammond: Well I can see that.
V: Of course you can. I'm not questioning your powers of observation I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is — Alan Moore

When I remembered Stefan first coming for me, it wasn't a man in a black mask or a crazy guy shoving Three Musketeers bars at me as he tried to convince me I was his brother. I remembered an ocean, dark as a universe without stars-black with guilt, despair, rage, violence, self loathing. All I could see was his hand reaching out of the water; the rest of him was buried in a liquid Hell he couldn't escape — Rob Thurman

TO MR. CYRIACK SKINNER UPON HIS BLINDNESS
Cyriack, this three years day these eys, though clear
To outward view, of blemish or of spot;
Bereft of light thir seeing have forgot,
Nor to thir idle orbs doth sight appear
Of Sun or Moon or Starre throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not
Against heavns hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear vp and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, Friend, to have lost them overply'd
In libertyes defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content though blind, had I no better guide. — John Milton

I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment, and he offered to pick up the sick man in an Army ambulance - put him in an Army biocontainment pod - and carry the pod to the Army's facilities at the Institute. — Richard Preston

Heroin is a stand-in, a stop-gap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly. — Ann Marlowe

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. — Oscar Wilde

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. — George Orwell

A general is a specialist insofar as he has master his craft. Beyond that and outside the arbitrary pro and con, he keeps a third possibility intact and in reserve: his own substance. He knows more than what he embodies and teaches, has other skills along with the ones for which he is paid. He keeps all that to himself; it is his property. It is set aside for his leisure, his soliloquies, his nights. At a propitious moment, he will put it into action, tear off his mask. So far, he has been racing well; within sight is the finish line, his final reserves start pouring in. Fate challenges him; he responds. The dream, even in an erotic encounter, comes true. But causally, even here; every goal is a transition for him. The bow should snap rather than aiming the arrow at a finite target. — Ernst Junger

Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his 'Asiatic serenity' is, I think, a mask for great coldness. The face one shows him he invariably reflects back at one, creating the illusion of warmth and depth when in fact he is brittle and shallow as a mirror. — Donna Tartt

What do I see? I see a man who has higher and thicker walls than I will ever have. I see a terrifying beast enveloped and hidden by a cleverly fashioned mask. I see tears that will never fall. I see blood and death. I see a heart that devours itself. I see the promise of a pain and deceit. I see a lot of things, Baltsaros. Many of them frightening," Jon said.

Baltsaros showed no surprise over Jon's words. Instead, he leaned towards him, intrigued. "And you're not afraid," he said. — Bey Deckard

During her life Veronika had noticed that a lot of people she knew would talk about the horrors in other people's lives as if they were genuinely trying to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them. She hated that kind of person, and she wasn't going to give the young man an opportunity to take advantage of her state in order to mask his own frustrations. — Paulo Coelho

Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth. — Oscar Wilde

Why do you wear a mask and hood?"
I think everybody will in the near future," was the man in black's reply. "They're terribly comfortable. — William Goldman

He wore a mask of elegance and indifference, his unusually handsome features taking on the appearance of a sculpture. But I had no idea what the artist was trying to say: Here's a man in denial? Here's a man without a soul? Here's a man who will build empires and legacies, whose pride shaped the land? Or here is a man who for once in his life, doesn't know who he is? — Karina Halle

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. — Roland Barthes

It's hard for a masked man to hide behind a mask when he isn't wearing one. — Lionel Suggs

Talkative represents the man or woman who delights in talking about divine things but has only theoretical knowledge of such things. No actual personal heart experience correlates to the matters they love to discuss so eloquently. They are often highly esteemed by others, but those closest to them would quickly betray a life out-of-sync with their words. The mask fashioned by fluency with all subjects divine hides their real life. — John Bunyan

Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask. — Alan Moore

He is a man-beast, carnivore incarnate, motivated by carnal avarice and wearing only the mask of civility.

She could sip from that cup.

It is his presumption that deters her: his belief that he has already caught Maud in his paw. — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it. — Oscar Wilde

Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks? — Mary Balogh

Readers tend to like a character who is at least superficially like themselves. But they quickly lose interest unless this particular character is somehow out of the ordinary. The character may wear the mask of the common man, but underneath his true face must always be the face of the hero. — Orson Scott Card

The Old Testament traces one complete cycle of that history, one people's rise and fall. This particular people is unique only in that they're the ones who begin to remember what man was made for. Moses' revelation at the burning bush is as profound as any religious scene in literature. There, he sees that the eternal creation and destruction of nature is not a mere process but the mask of a personal spirit, I AM THAT I AM. The centuries that follow that revelation are a spiraling semicircle of sin and shame and redemption, of freedom recovered and then surrendered in return for imperial greatness, of a striving toward righteousness through law that reveals only the impossibility of righteousness, of power and pride and fall. It's every people's history, in other words, but seen anew in the light of the fire of I AM. It — Andrew Klavan

Yet after all there is nothing so deceptive as one's outward appearance. The reason of this is that as soon as childhood is past, we are always pretending to be what we are not
and thus, with constant practice from our youth up, we manage to make our physical frames complete disguises for our actual selves. It is really wise and clever of us
for hence each individual is so much flesh-wall through which neither friend nor enemy can spy. Every man is a solitary soul imprisoned in a self-made den
when he is quite alone he knows and frequently hates himself
sometimes he even gets afraid of the gaunt and murderous monster he keeps hidden behind his outwardly pleasant body-mask, and hastens to forget its frightful existence in drink and debauchery. — Marie Corelli

He had a high-cheekboned face with steady gray eyes, a broad-bridged aquiline nose and a wide, thin mouth. It was the countenance of a man who was clever, as ruthless with himself as with others, possessed of courage and humor, who hid his weaknesses behind a mask of wit - and sometimes of affected coldness. — Anne Perry

What man so wise, what earthly wit so ware,
As to descry the crafty cunning train,
By which deceit doth mask in visor fair,
And cast her colours dyed deep in grain,
To seem like truth, whose shape she well can feign,
And fitting gestures to her purpose frame,
The guiltless man with guile to entertain? — Edmund Spenser

I wear the mask. It does not wear me. — Man In The Iron Mask

A man doesn't put on a mask unless he's got some dark work in mind. — Joe Abercrombie

Uncle alone in the house with the children said he'd dress up to amuse them. After a long wait, as he did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man putting the table silver into a bag. 'Oh, Uncle,' they cried in delight. 'Yes, isn't my make-up good?' said Uncle, taking his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism of humour. Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the children); antithesis: it WAS a burglar (a laugh for the reader); synthesis: it still was Uncle (fooling the reader). — Vladimir Nabokov

He who has perceived the material out of which the Promethean tragic writers prior to Euripides formed their heroes, and how remote from their purpose it was to bring the faithful mask of reality onto the stage, will also be aware of the utterly opposite tendency of Euripides. Through him the everyday man forced his way from the spectators' seats onto the stage; the mirror in which formerly only grand and bold traits were represented now showed the painful fidelity that conscientiously reproduces even the botched outlines of nature. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Comic book writers often suggest that women don't have the same dedication to the noble cause, because their need for love is often of equal or greater importance than their quest for justice. Superheroines want to fight crime, but want to settle down as well. If Mr. Right popped the question, a heroine could easily retire that mask and cape and settle down to life as a wife and mother. The implication is that no matter how powerful a woman is, she needs the love of a man to complete her. — Mike Madrid

Reality is the most effective mask of reality. Our fondest wish, attained, ceases to be our fondest wish. Success is the greatest of disappointments. The spirit is most alive when it is lost. Anxiety was Kafka's composure, as despair was Kierkegaard's happiness. Kafka said impatience is our greatest fault. The man at the gate of the Law waited there all of his life. — Guy Davenport