The Masquerade Quotes & Sayings

The danger of attending the extroverts' masquerade ball is that we surround ourselves with people who only like us for our disguise. — Michaela Chung

No matter how much you love someone, time heals your pain and your death wish. — Parul Wadhwa

Sometimes it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones gave to his face the aspect of a mask. — Angela Carter

And who shall you be once you don your grand disguise?"
"La luna," she said with a smile.
"Then I shall be la notte to your moon" Archer lifted the hard black mask he held and slipped it over his thinner silk one — Kristen Callihan

College life is different, entirely different like you don't have to get ready and wear that red and crisp blue school uniform and look alike every day. Free to define ourselves with statement attire. Good thing. — Parul Wadhwa

Wondering what it would have been like to go to the prom instead of a masquerade ball full of killers. — Susan Ee

One of the greatest obstacles I see to our fashioning a rational approach to spirituality is to have religious superstition and self-deception masquerade as science. — Sam Harris

Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. — Kate Chopin

Some questions are more complicated than their answers could be. — Parul Wadhwa

I almost trust her to burn the bridges while standing at the cliff herself. She hardly agrees to be on the same page as others, either ahead of all or all in a different book. — Parul Wadhwa

We somehow must become what we are not, sacrificing what we are, to inherit the masquerade of what we will be. — Shane Koyczan

I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as "kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But of course it doesn't put it like that. It talks of "low intensity conflict ... " What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies. — Harold Pinter

We are hell different but vanity keeps us stuck. — Parul Wadhwa

I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified ... all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain. — Eric Ambler

In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby. — Parul Wadhwa

How did the muskrat discover our composter in the first place? Chased there by a predator scare, a waft of citrus scent carried to the creek by the evening thermal, or some adventurous urge to journey beyond the safety of the creek? The latter, admittedly anthropomorphic possibility appeals to me. While it's important not to get so far into such projections of human qualities into non-human realities that they begin to masquerade as fact, it's equally important to recognize that they provide openings for affection not unlike those that enable our affections for fellow human beings. Drawn into closer observation of the small details of muskrat behavior, the hand-like deftness of their front paws, their cat-like grooming, the contrast between their nervousness on land and their confident ease in the water, I quickly realized that I'd been observing more than one, perhaps several, individuals. I looked upon them with growing affection, with friendship. — Reg Darling

It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn't. — Frank Rich

The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't be coy, Joshua. No matter how much money the other men here have, they can't buy what you've gotten for free. — Mora Early

It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept. — Sarah Hall

I am sick and tired of coming good on expectations. — Parul Wadhwa

I am a palette of emotions; I remember how I have cov-eted to be free from the school rules. I look around to see people casually dressed up and walking with an aim maybe to make a better career or just add fame of DU degree like me. The campus is buzzing with freshman and activity. I just hope, these corridors, hallways, and passages don't see me trip-ping and falling any day. I feel more comfortable standing in between the crowd of people moving. Like nobody is paying any heed. You can be yourself without feeling awkward about anything. — Parul Wadhwa

People froze you in place, Rebecca sometimes thought, trudging through the woods. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it. — Anna Quindlen

Actually on the point of tears, though I knew perfectly well at that moment that all this was out of Pushkin's Silvio and Lermontov's Masquerade. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I don't know whose bright idea it was to turn the prom into a masquerade ball, but whoever it was, I'm going to kick them in the balls for it. — Melyssa Winchester

And a lot of times, the religious discussion is almost a masquerade for the real question, is what stories that we tell ourselves and that we tell each other and what convictions and beliefs actually have the capacity to make us the kind of people who together can make the world the kind of world we all want it to be? — Rob Bell

A mask is a mirror. The masquerade is the only time I am me and it doesn't matter how many men I have sex with or how many girls I touch, I want more. — Chloe Thurlow

Living independent might come as appalling as the word to anyone but me. The one who thinks it's a cool idea and worth it, has sure forgotten that independence comes with a price. If one doesn't still agree, you gotta try staying at a hostel. — Parul Wadhwa

The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools' Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devils' Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade. — Oscar Wilde

A wedding is a funeral which masquerades as a feast. And the greater the pageantry, the deeper the savagery. — Julie Burchill

There was no one to tell Scarlett that her own personality, frighteningly vital though it was, was more attractive than any masquerade she might adopt. Had she been told, she would have been pleased but unbelieving. And the civilization of which she was a part would have been unbelieving too, for at no time, before or since, had so low a premium been placed on feminine naturalness. — Margaret Mitchell

Marriage, after all, was the known, not the unknown: the dull dinner party, not the madcap masquerade. It was a set of issues and events that audiences knew all too well offscreen. Unlike the wide-open frontier of the western, offering freedom and adventure, or the lyrical musical, with its fantasy of release through singing and dancing, or the woman's film, with its placing of a marginalized social figure (the woman) at the center of the universe, or the gangster movie, with its violent excitement and obvious sexual freedom, the marriage film had to reflect what moviegoers already had experienced: marriage, in all its boredom and daily responsibilities. — Jeanine Basinger

I have a distinct air of myself standing amidst such a crowd of people. My eyes set above, looking at the tall building if it bespeaks a promising note. I don't know how fair is life, All I know is I have a plan to alter the face of it, the way I choose. A purpose, a driving motive, and an obsession. — Parul Wadhwa

A mask you ask? Optional I find!
Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind. — E.A. Bucchianeri

The food in the hostel mess is worst of a kind. The grief in my words reach easily to those who have "been there and done that" Chapatti in the meal is either so uncooked or overly cooked and you can only expect dal in the ocean of water when you are ready to swim. — Parul Wadhwa

And the touch of her own mask, at first cool and clammy leather, but quickly like a second skin, and the play it gives her, herself a stage, her every breath a performance, and yet (herein lies the magic) also and entirely true. Every game, every lie flirting and cruel - and the house is full of them, games and lies - is real as knives, for the masquerade has come to define the night. The false face of everyday, that hides reality beneath flesh and skin, is itself hidden beneath the fantasy that, because it is a product and reflection of the mind, is an honest facade. Sadie has lived a wary, defensive life, always urged by that self-preserving instinct to stay small, hidden, safe. She did not know she had an imp inside her until she wore it on her face.

("One Of The Hungry Ones") — Holly Phillips

Myth is history in a masquerade costume. Peel away the fantastical facade, and you will always find a core of truth." Adrien Morel — Louisa Burton

Swoon, Dora. Every young woman deserves to swoon over the love of her life. — Nancy Moser

Life is all about the choices we didn't make; it's Any day worth the risk. — Parul Wadhwa

She is too upfront for her own good — Parul Wadhwa

I'm determined that I won't give up on my dreams for anything. I have evolved in these years. Learned and outgrown a lot many things including the unrealistic expectations of my family,fake relationships,society's criticism,surpassed people who are intimidated by my outspoken nature, Faux friends and especially the people who disappear in dark whenever they think its easier for them to do so. I have grown over stupid and useless conversations. The insecurity and the feeling of self doubt. I have never been less burdened. — Parul Wadhwa

My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like "dental" and "transcendental" (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch
words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons
so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world. — Vladimir Nabokov

If the Masquerade could not be stopped by spear or treaty, she would change it from within. — Seth Dickinson

We are not going to be the agency where large businesses can masquerade as a small business and get a contract. We are closing down on fraud, waste and abuse. — Karen Mills

Abstract conversations are my favourite, for they unviel true convictions. — Parul Wadhwa

Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Being watched in the act of coitus is disconcerting, even for the most brazen. Yet, more than merely making the experience tolerable, masks reveal an innate longing to play to the crowd, to be naked, sweating, screaming in orgasm. — Chloe Thurlow

The Vampire Masquerade
Mask of jewels across a pale face
Disguise the evil that makes no mistakes
Drops of red blood on delicate white lace
The body lies still and only time awaits. — S.L. Ross

English life is nothing but a huge masquerade ball in which the participants contrive to conceal their feelings, their addresses, their hobbies, their incomes, their decorations, their sorrows, their talents, their achievements, and even their names. — Pierre Daninos

Lady Astor was also said to have responded to a question from Churchill about what disguise he should wear to a masquerade ball by saying, "Why don't you come sober, Prime Minister?"
(Reported exchange with Winston Churchill) — Nancy Astor The Viscountess Astor

So, according to Vedanta, the central doctrine of Hinduism, all bodies are the clothes of the one and only Self in its innumerable disguises, and the whole universe is a masquerade ball pretending to be a tragedy and then realizing that it's a ball. — Alan W. Watts

The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade. — Vladimir Nabokov

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. — Cesare Pavese

I don't have diamonds or solitaires now, but with this water of the pool and this bottle of beer, I vow before you to love you forever. — Parul Wadhwa

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes ... — Joy Williams

Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back and his mane like a lion's, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of his office flapping around him like the red wings of an archangel. And the King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind. The preposterous masquerade, born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world. This was the normal, this was sanity, this was nature, and he himself, with his rationality, and his detachment and his black frock-coat, he was the exception and the accident - a blot of black upon a world of crimson and gold. — G.K. Chesterton

I think there has to be an underlying sexuality. There has to be a perverseness to the clothes. There is a hidden agenda in the fragility of romance. It's like a Story of O. I am not big on women looking naive. There has to be a sinister aspect, whether it's melancholy of sadomasochist. I think everyone has a deep sexuality, and sometimes it's good to use a little of it-and sometimes a lot of it-like a masquerade. — Alexander McQueen

Masks reveal the shape of your soul and the state of the world and, in today's world, everyone wears a mask. — Chloe Thurlow

The worst have scraped out the mantle of the best and wear it around as something real. It takes no genius to see that. But I moved to San Francisco because the masquerade of kindly gestures is, at least, kind. And it remains kind. And all the people who would sit back and comment on the garishness of the costumes, the hollowness of the dialogue, the lack of divine conviction, well, all those people are either dead or fifteen years old. — Jay Caspian Kang

Philosophy has been a masked ball in which a religious image of humankind is renewed in the guise humanist ideas of progress and enlightenment. Even philosophy's greatest unmaskers have ended up as figures in the masquerade. Removing the masks from our animal faces is a task that has hardly begun. — John N. Gray

After the masquerade, if we had found each other, if I had asked it of you, would you have taken me as your lover?"
She closed her eyes, but it only made her more acutely aware of his hands moving down to caress her arms. She couldn't think. Why did he ask? Would a lie be kinder than the truth? Everything was blurring.
"Yes. — Elena Greene

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,
the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice,
we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In 1996, when my first novel, 'Masquerade,' was published, I knew international thrillers - or spy novels, if you prefer - had been the domain of male authors for decades. — Gayle Lynds

Perhaps it increased his annoyance that there was a certain unusual liveliness about the usually languid figure of Fisher. The ordinary image of him in March's mind was that of a pallid and bald-browed gentleman, who seemed to be prematurely old as well as prematurely bald. He was remembered as a man who expressed the opinions of a pessimist in the language of a lounger. Even now March could not be certain whether the change was merely a sort of masquerade of sunshine, or that effect of clear colors and clean-cut outlines that is always visible on the parade of a marine resort, relieved against the blue dado of the sea. But Fisher had a flower in his buttonhole, and his friend could have sworn he carried his cane with something almost like the swagger of a fighter. With such clouds gathering over England, the pessimist seemed to be the only man who carried his own sunshine. — G.K. Chesterton

Pity is like lust ... both like to masquerade as love and it's powerfully hard to know the difference when you're in the throes of it. — Michelle Black

'Masquerade' is the autobiography of Wyclef Jean. A lot of people know me through my work with Carlos Santana or Destiny's Child, winning all those Grammy Awards, but you do not know what is going on inside me. — Wyclef Jean

Irigaray remarks in such a vein that "the masquerade... is what women do... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up their own". — Judith Butler

You should have seen the costumes for the last few prom themes: Pimps and their srteet ho's; CEOs and their office ho's; GI Joes and their combat ho's; Gardeners and their garden hose;Firemen and their fire hose ... If you ask me, a 'masquerade' theme isn't flattering for anyones features, nor does it define the apppropriate gender roles very clearly. — The Harvard Lampoon

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

But there was one mistake in this masquerade that revealed the supposed human spirit was literally blowing smoke: It took the form of a woman only from the waist up. That's typical of the demonic; they always give themselves away with some abnormality of appearance when they try to manifest themselves as human beings. — Ralph Sarchie

Maybe I should ask Awkward if it wanted to go to the masquerade with me since lately we seemed to be spending so much time together. — Sariah Wilson

Rationality is the way to lead life. So high time,
let's stop feeding our dreams and shake hands with the reality. — Parul Wadhwa

Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade. — K. Hari Kumar

For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame. who in the world would have thot of her like that? when most people looked they only saw a certain collection of bones, a selection of forms filling space. but he saw past the mouth and the eyes. the archetecture of the body, her fleshy masquerade. other boys were happy enuf to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained by the bodys shadow theater but he had to come backstage. he went down into the mines. into the dark, brot up the gold. your new self, a better self. but wat good was it if he was jus gonna leave her behind. his poets lady, his silver lilly. he was a boy who knew things, things that looked one way but proved to be another. — Janet Fitch

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse. — Parul Wadhwa

Adam stared down at me, his expression thunderous. "It was you. I know it was you."
My head was rocking side to side before I could stop it. "No." I wrenched my hand free of his. "You're wrong."
"I'm not!" Anger blazed hot behind his eyes as they burned into me. "Look at me, Kia! Look me in the eye and tell me you're not her. — Airicka Phoenix

That is the essence and mission of 'rebel buddha': to free us from the illusions we create by ourselves, about ourselves, and from those that masquerade as reality in our cultural and religious institutions. — Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions. — Paul De Man

The mask in which you choose to disguise yourself uncovers who you subconsciously are or want to be. Masks reveal in the eyes the face that lies hidden as if the mask is a dark glass mirroring your soul. — Chloe Thurlow

To become - in Jung's terms - individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one's various life roles. 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do,' and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one's pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one's infatuations. It is a common thing to be overly impressed by and attached to masks, either some mask of one's own or the mana-masks of others. The work of individuation, however, demands that one should not be compulsively affected in this way. The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one's own center, in control of one's for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles. — Joseph Campbell

No man can know his deliverer, nor yet the thief of his soul. Their faces are covered; they swirl in the mob at the masquerade ball. Wine flows, and dance follows dance, and we are never certain of their names until that Midnight when all masks are removed — Robert V.S. Redick

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy. — George Santayana

Everton" (Francis)
Alex turned his head to view a rainbow peacock mask bobbing toward him. "Good Lord, Francis, you are replendent," he said admiringly.
The peacock stopped beside him. "Dash it, Everton, how'd you know it was me?"
You're still wearing your faux ruby ring. — Suzanne Enoch

At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. — Henry David Thoreau

As is gloriously sung in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta "H.M.S. Pinafore," in the words of W. S. Gilbert: "Things are seldom as they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream." — W.S. Gilbert

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade. — Jodi Picoult

Glasses, yet to make the masquerade complete, at such a dinner there should have been wine or champagne. It — Aleatha Romig

The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians. — Bartolome De Las Casas

I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing; the same person telling the story will tell it differently. I think of that masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives. — Chinua Achebe

The "progressives" who today masquerade as "liberals" may rant against "fascism"; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism. Nothing could have been more helpful to the success of the National-Socialist (Nazi) movement than the methods used by the "progressives," denouncing Nazism as a party serving the interests of "capital." The German workers knew this tactic too well to be deceived by it again. — Ludwig Von Mises

A mask tempts the wearer to play out carnal fantasies and, come daylight, the perfume of a stranger's sex on your flesh and clothes can be blamed or thanked on the metamorphosis stirred by the mystery of the mask. — Chloe Thurlow

You get quick money, it's beautiful, there's sunshine, but at the end of the day, you find out it's all a masquerade, baby. It's not what it seems. — Wyclef Jean

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living. — Germaine Greer

You may not believe it, but it is what I desire the most in the world. This place has afflicted me with a terrible wanderlust. I long for the fire, for the sights you have seen. Yet here I am, two hundred years after I arrived. Still a prisoner, though I masquerade as a king. — Samantha Shannon

Yeah, I was at the Masquerade of the Damned. — Richelle Mead

He is quick witted, yes! Astute big time & level headed in opinion. It is my firsthand judgment of a man. — Parul Wadhwa

The social prestige of wine at table and at the club must be destroyed through lofty example and polite ridicule; forces which are not always available, and for whose successful operation much time will be required. But the outstanding fact remains, that the world has come to regard liquor in a new and clearer light. Our next generation of poets will contain but few Anacreons, for the thinking element of mankind has robbed the flowing bowl of its fancied virtues and fictitious beauties. The grape, so long permitted to masquerade as the inspirer of wit and art, is now revealed as the mother of ruin and death. The wolf at last stands divested of its sheep's clothing. — H.P. Lovecraft

Nostalgia washes over me with tons of memors and lifetime rolled on this land. Every oblivious memory from the childhood wraps open in the fragrance of these busy roads and familiar land, long signals, irritating traffic,honking cars,rushing people,excessive pollution defining Delhi at its best. — Parul Wadhwa