No More Masks Quotes & Sayings

I've always used masks. I think it's a lot about the fact that masks often reveal a sort of subconscious element to a character. The mask is carved and given an expression or markings to reveal something, even though it's shielding the face. Even though it's hiding the face, it seems to reveal something underneath. — Dave McKean

Like Batman, all of us hide behind our masks and use them to help define ourselves for others. We all have secret identities of a sort, hidden behind our smiling social-networking profiles or our happy church faces. They're not lies, really. They're just not the whole truth, because we know that most of the people we encounter day-to-day couldn't handle the truth (or perhaps we couldn't handle giving it to them). — Paul Asay

I once asked the servants why none of them had blue eyes like my aunts. They replied that only the ladies could afford to buy the blue glass cups in which they kept their eyes at night to make them more blue and beautiful, and furthermore, if we went on asking silly questions, the rats that steal the faces of inquisitive children in order to wear them as masks would come to take us to live in the twilit world between the ceiling and the roof where no one ever dared to go. — Jose Donoso

FACE ONE WEARS as an adult is a mask that's cut to fit in her youth." There are many kinds of masks, Anna thought. Theater masks and Halloween masks and surgical masks and fencing masks and diving masks and wrestling masks and ski masks. Welding visors and face cages, blindfolds and dominos. And death masks. The Doktor continued. "Every mask becomes a death mask when you can no longer put it on or take it off at will. When it conforms to the contours of your psychic face. When you mistake the persona you project for your living soul. When you can no more distinguish between the two. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty as those who abuse. Stand up for the innocent or go down with the rest. — Flora Jessop

Did you know that the word person comes from the Latin word persona, which means mask? So maybe being human means we invite spectators to ponder what lies behind. Each of us will be composed of a variety of masks, and if we can see behind the mask, we would get a burst of clarity. And if that flame was bright enough, that's when we fall in love. — John Cusack

They both wore flat, creased faces that looked like abused rubbery masks. — Rion Amilcar Scott

Referring to a mask as a law of nature is another way of saying that it cannot be escaped or transcended; there is no getting beyond or beneath it. But when Deleuze describes the intention of interpretation, we find it is 'an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped'." The Nietzschean-inspired disavowal of ideology is based on the claim that critique is only an ongoing series of interpretations where masks give way to nothing but more of their own. Deleuze's instruction is to pierce masks so that motivations and strategies can be discovered, whether they belong to subjects or to a particular manifestation of power. The obvious implication is that the appearance of a mask obscures other qualities that are potentially more fundamental than just another mask. — John Grant

The people you think are the happiest are usually the saddest; that's because they see more and feel deeper than others do. They are the sensitive and they see beyond the veil of what's tangible and what's not. They wear no masks and can see through the masks of others. The sensitive to life are few in number, which is why they feel so alone ... because they are all alone. — Donna Lynn Hope

We were meant to survive because of our minds' ability to reason, our ability to live with frustration in order to maintain our virtue. We wore smiling masks while dying inside. — Anchee Min

All our work in the field, in the garden, in the city, in the home, in struggle, in government-to what does it all amount before God except child's play, by means of which God is pleased to give his gifts in the field, at home, and everywhere? These are the masks of our Lord God, behind which he wants to be hidden and to do all things. — Martin Luther

He asks, "how hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay, and Google?"33 Wu is putting his finger on a disquieting new reality - that the new communication medium a younger generation gravitated to because of its promise of openness, transparency, and deep social collaboration masks another persona more concerned with ringing up profit by advancing a networked Commons. — Jeremy Rifkin

I found myself wanting the monster because it was honest, a level of honesty most go their entire lives without confronting, always content to hide behind their social masks and business cards. It — Kitty Thomas

Adversity challenges the masks we hide behind, revealing sides of ourselves we have not yet comfortably with the world outside. It is why we dislike adversity, because we have to face what we don't yet understand about ourselves. — Michael Arndt

Argument closes off the doors of the senses. It always masks violence. Continued too long, argument always leads to violence. — Frank Herbert

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. — David Foster Wallace

The people we invite on the train are those with whom we are prepared to be vulnerable and real, with whom there is no room for masks and games. They strengthen us when we falter and remind us of the journey's purpose when we become distracted by the scenery. And we do the same for them. Never let life's Iagos - flatterers, dissemblers - onto your train. We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear, but we are often too busy to notice. When you realize they've made it on board, make sure you usher them off the train; and as soon as you can, forgive them and forget them. There is nothing more draining than holding grudges. — Arianna Huffington

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day ...
To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way. — Terri Windling

Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen. — Kealan Patrick Burke

I'm a tearless clown. If I were to get a tattoo, it would be the two masks, and they would be both smiling. — Andy Samberg

We deny more than we confess. We hide more than we reveal. We assume because it makes us feel exposed if we have to ask. It's easier to say "I feel nothing" than to admit "I feel something." It takes no courage to say, "I hate you" but it takes a great deal of moxie to declare its opposite. Masks are elaborate and everyone has one. It takes a while to get to know people. This doesn't make them special, it makes them like everyone else. Sometimes our hearts scream yes while our heads say run; and only one can be obeyed. — Donna Lynn Hope

Clean your face," I said to the child. "It's dirty." "It's not," the child said. "By God it is," I said, "filth adheres in ine areas which I shall enumerate." "That is because of the dough," the child said. "We were taking death masks." "Dough!" I exclaimed, shocked at the idea that the child had wasted flour and water and no doubt paper too in this lightsome pastime, taking death masks. "Death!" I exclaimed for added emphasis. "What do you know of death?" "It is the end of the world," the child said, "for the death-visited individual. The world ends," the child said, "when you turn out your eyes." This was true, I could not dispute it. I returned to the main point. "Your father is telling you to wash your face," I said, locating myself in the abstract where I was more comfortable. — Donald Barthelme

Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army - a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon the Salvation Army. — A.E. Coppard

I am a she. The mask is a he, or is actually gender-neutral. People love the character. — K. Guillory

I have so much respect for the emotionally brave. The ones who put in the emotional work and take the real risks of being vulnerable and removing masks. It's easy to make chitchat, but it's hard to speak about what's really under the surface. It's easy to joke, but difficult to cry. It's easy to numb, but hard to feel.
Ironically the real victims of emotional laziness are the people themselves. They end up choosing their emotional comfort zones over happiness. So in the end, they may not be 'uncomfortable' anymore; but they are also miserable. — Yasmin Mogahed

There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong. — Tom Robbins

Madonna has a far profounder vision of sex than do the feminists. She sees both the animality and the artifice. Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure. Feminism says, 'No more masks.' Madonna says we are nothing but masks. Through her enormous impact on young women around the world, Madonna is the future of feminism. — Camille Paglia

Possible Ending #16 (Life Imitates Art Imitates Life Imitates Art Imitates): I'd seen this movie. Obvious ending: outright betrayal, lesson learned, life is heartbreak, people who mean well still fuck you over, everyone's sad, greedy, looking out for number one, no consideration for the fragile fat boy whose displayed cynicism only masks a deeper hope that everyone's okay, will ultimately end up all right, that love exists, that happiness may not be stable but at least comes in bursts, that everything worthwhile wasn't just a self-created illusion. — Adam Wilson

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo. — Paul Valery

Taking off the masks, being real, and living in freedom - this is a process. After all, it takes some time to get to know the real you. This is not about loving yourself more and embracing the "you" that you were always meant to be. No, this is about seeing the real you in the real Light. It is a good thing to feel horrified by the real you and run to the only One who can save you from yourself. The gospel frees you to believe that there is no "making it" and therefore you can stop "faking it." You already have everything you need through the righteousness earned for you on the cross. If you believe these truths, the masks you wear will begin to melt away. Then, bit by bit, we can help one another become free as well. Allow other moms to be imperfect. Allow yourself to be imperfect. Be free! — Kimm Crandall

For many men value appearances more than reality - thus they violate what's right. Everyone's prepared to sigh over some suffering man, though no sorrow really eats their hearts, or they can pretend to join another person's happiness forcing their faces into smiling masks. But a good man discerns true character - he's not fooled by eyes feigning loyalty, favouring him with watered-down respect. — Aeschylus

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

You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.' On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington's honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed? — John Le Carre

When my father was vigorous and lucid, (my mother) regarded medicine as her wily ally in a lifelong campaign to keep old age, sickness, and death at bay. Now ally and foe exchanged masks. Medicine looked more like the enemy, and death the friend. (p. 184) — Katy Butler

I've often thought that among all the afflicting sights of the world, none can be much more so than this one short walk along three city blocks, where night after night it's possible to see--indeed, it's impossible not to see--these faces from which hope and joy and dignity and light have been draining so steadily and for so long that now there is nothing left but this assortment of indifferent, damaged masks. They belong to human beings who, after a lifetime of struggling to become one thing or another, have succeeded only in becoming the rough sketches of their species, recognizable but empty, the bruised and wretched bodies and souls of the saddest people on earth: the people who no longer care. — Edwin O'Connor

No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love. — Arthur Schnitzler

Because anger has too many faces, too many masks. This type of anger is the kind you don't recognize until it's too late — Rachel Van Dyken

I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks. — Mary Roach

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen, the seven masks I have fashioned an worn in seven lives, I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves."
Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.
And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."
Thus I became a madman. — Kahlil Gibran

The irony is that when we're standing across from someone who is hidden or shielded by masks and armor, we feel frustrated and disconnected. That's the paradox here: Vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me, but the first thing I look for in you. If — Brene Brown

I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing ... I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job. — Elizabeth Hand

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue. — Washington Irving

Every time you name yourself, you name someone else. — Bertolt Brecht

So it became,
the law of universe,
to have the,
profoundest,
of the words,
cloaked in the,
darkest of the masks. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When you're an insecure teenager, you build walls and defenses and masks, and those are incredibly satisfying to perform and chip away at. I mean, when I was an insecure teenager, you'd have had no idea what I was insecure about because I hid it so well. Only confident people are comfortable wearing their vulnerabilities on their sleeve. — Sarah Steele

Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death
in a cesspool. — Charles Bukowski

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. — Salman Rushdie

The masks had been made in Korea, delivering back to the West the faces they had given the rest of the globe: presidents, screen stars, and mass murderers. The rubber filament inevitably snapped from the staple after five minutes. The graft wouldn't take. — Colson Whitehead

A bank in Washington was robbed by two men in George W. Bush masks. Luckily, right afterwards two guys in President Obama masks came and bailed the bank out, so everything is fine. — Conan O'Brien

Never question yourself to satisfy the comfort of those living blindly by the false masks of life. — Nikki Rowe

It is said that my art has some typically Nordic features: the curving lines, the convolutions, the magical masks and staring eyes that appear in myths and folk art. This may be. My interest in the dynamics of Jugend style probably also comes into it. — Asger Jorn

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything is silent again: but it isn't the same silence. It's raining: tapping lightly against the frosted glass windows; if there are any more masked children in the street, the rain is going to spoil their cardboard masks. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds. — Hakim Bey

We become the masks we wear. — Brent Weeks

No matter the masks we wear, we always end up together. — Jodi Meadows

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart. — Tom Bissell

Names are masks, they get in the way. — Matthew Woodring Stover

That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession. — Jim Morrison

What do you have there?"
Mouse perked up at her interest. "I'm making ski masks to have on hand for bank robberies. Last night I finished the fingerless mermaid gloves for Eve. She likes her fingers free for gunplay."
Mouse's needles clicked together in a peaceful rhythm. — Debra Anastasia

The Universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity - those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity - those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes. — Hakim Bey

She understood at least as well as I did what corruption and pitiless cruelty might be hidden behind the masks that some people wore. - Addison Goodheart pg 93 — Dean Koontz

Do you think you wear a mask?'

'I'm wearing one right now.' Valentino smiled softly. 'We both are.'

'It's a sad thought.'

'Yes,' he said. 'But sometimes I wonder about the alternative. Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves? — Catherine Doyle

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented. — John Fowles

What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated. — Janet Frame

Strip is the power. I'm ready to strip ... I think everyone is. In that I'm saying I think everyone is ready to take off masks and pretentious costumes that don't represent who they truly are. — Truth Hurts

It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas - whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers, ranchers, and bureaucrats - and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place - there is nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true. That is why we are here. That is why we do what we do. There is nothing intellectual about it. We love the land. It is a primal affair. — Terry Tempest Williams