facade Quotes

“I hope you liked Diary Amy. She was meant to be likable. Meant for someone like you to like her.”

“But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women: Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it. She needed to be Amazing Amy, all the time. Here in Missouri, the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember. Competition doesn’t interest them.”

“Nick loved a girl who doesn’t exist. I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can’t help it, it’s what I’ve always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what’s coveted, what’s au courant? I think most people do this, they just don’t admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.”

“I often don’t say this out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.”

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such things as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.”

“But there was a Germany the boys could not see, a Germany that was hidden from them, either by design or by time. It wasn’t just that the signs - ‘Für Juden verboten,’ ‘Juden sind hier unerwünscht’ - had been removed, or that the Gypsies had been rounded up and taken away, or that the vicious Stürmer newspaper had been withdrawn from the racks in the tobacco shops in Kopenick. There were larger, darker, more enveloping secrets all around them.”

“Honey: Oh, isn’t this lovely. Nick: Yes indeed…very handsome. ”

“Martha: Can I get you a drink, Martha? Why, thank you, George; that’s very kind of you. No, Martha, no; why I’d do anything for you.”

“As a general rule, most women, before they’ve got ‘em, present to their men smiling, agreeing faces. They hide their thoughts. You now, when you’re feeling hateful, honey, you are hateful.”

“How is it possible for me to be so miserable and embarrassed and humiliated and beaten and still function, still talk and smile and concentrate?”

“What I want to tell you is, I think the English patient is not English.”

“I might have stopped anyway, to show off Rita. The whole point of wearing a disguise was to be seen wearing her.”

That night the city wore the mask of a capital.

His whole life was make-believe, and just now he was pretending to be a philanthropist.