#masks

Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life. I sometimes muse over this sketch of a story about a man afflicted by one of those personal tragedies born of extreme shyness who one day, while wearing a mask I don’t know where, told another mask all the most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things that could be told about his tragic and serene life. And since no outward detail would give him away, he having disguised even his voice, and since he didn’t take careful note of whoever had listened to him, he could enjoy the ample sensation of knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who knew him as not even his closest and finest friend did. When he walked down the street he would ask himself if this person, or that one, or that person over there might not be the one to whom he’d once, wearing a mask, told his most private life. Thus would be born in him a new interest in each person, since each person might be his only, unknown confidant. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#life

Horror is the removal of masks. ↗

— Robert Bloch

#masks #horror

To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn't understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion - that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it. ↗

— Melissa Leo

#emotion #emotions #full #harder #masks

Before children, even the most cynical people throw down their usual masks and become capable of feeling the purity and love which all human beings seek. ↗

— Sun Myung Moon

#before #beings #capable #children #cynical

The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept. ↗

— George Plimpton

#concept #front #guest #list #masks

They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all. ↗

— Peter Shaffer

#audience #course #depressed #drama #great

It is a career of make-believe, of masks. We all have masks in life. ↗

— Judd Nelson

#life #make-believe #masks

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

#clown #get #i #masks #smiling

I bare my nakedness to the world that the world may see who I am; not the mask that hides my flaws, not the mask that hides my beauty. I bask in the light and I take off the mask! ↗

— Jocelyn Soriano

#masks #motivational #truth #beauty

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