#asks

Stories are masks of God. That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm. Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth. Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God. So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. ↗

— Melanie Tem

#buddha #children #god #jesus #joseph-campbell

Was Briony the only person who could hear the venom dripping from the woman’s tongue? What good was beauty — a mature beauty, but beauty nonetheless — if it cloaked such a viperous soul? ↗

— Tad Williams

#evil #masks #beauty

You suck. You suck diseased moose wang, Marcone. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#dresden-files #death

Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair. ↗

— Clive Barker

#barker #clive #halloween #harvey #hood

I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me I believe in my dance-- And my destiny ↗

— Sam Shepard

#faith #idenity #lies #lying #masks

A sense of accomplishment comes when you have completed the tasks for the goals you have set for yourself. ↗

— Brenda Johnson Padgitt

#brenda-johnson-padgitt #dreams #goals #tasks #dreams

It often occurs that pride and selfishness are muddled with strength and independence. They are neither equal nor similar; in fact, they are polar opposites. A coward may be so cowardly that he masks his weakness with some false personification of power. He is afraid to love and to be loved because love tends to strip bare all emotional barricades. Without love, strength and independence are prone to losing every bit of their worth; they become nothing more than a fearful, intimidated, empty tent lost somewhere in the desert of self. ↗

— Criss Jami

#barricade #coward #cowardice #desert #ego

Don't be afraid to talk, be afraid of staying quite. ↗

— Eugene Lebid

#helpful #inspiration #quite #scared #stay

One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world. ↗

— Austin Grossman

#masks #shut-up #supervillains #world-domination #anger

Such an Ibisian scene: both their faces were formal masks, their posture correct, pain kept inside where it cut deeper. ↗

— Andrea K. Höst

#family #masks #pain #family