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1 " 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
2 " I’ll tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell them it was my fault.”He looked at her, gold eyes incredulous. “You can’t lie to them.”“I’m not. I brought you back,” she said. “You were dead, and I brought you back. I upset the balance, not you. I opened the door for Lilith and her stupid ritual. I could have asked for anything, and I asked for you.” She tightened her grip on his shirt, her fingers white with cold and pressure. “And I would do it again. I love you, Jace Wayland—Herondale—Lightwood—whatever you want to call yourself. I don’t care. I love you and I wil always love you, and pretending it could be any other way is just a waste of time. "
― Cassandra Clare , City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments, #4)
3 " Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it. "
― Mary Ann Shaffer , The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
4 " When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny. "
― Paulo Coelho , The Devil and Miss Prym
5 " To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher " reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime. "
6 " The Death Eaters can't all be pure-blood, there aren't enough pure-blood wizards left," said Hermione stubbornly. " I expect most of them are half-bloods pretending to be pure. It's only Muggle-borns they hate, they'd be quite happy to let you and Ron join up" " There is no way they'd let me be a Death Eater!" said Ron indignantly...." My whole family are blood traitors! That's as bad as Muggle-borns to Death Eaters!" " And they'd love to have me," said Harry sarcastically. " We'd be best pals if they didn't keep trying to do me in. "
7 " I may not look like much, but I'm an expert at pretending to be a ninja. "
― Darynda Jones , First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson, #1)
8 " If you think I'm going to let six people risk their lives - !''because it's the first time for all of us,' said Ron.'This is different, pretending to be me -''Well, none of us really fancy it, Harry,' said Fred earnestly. 'Imagine if something went wrong and we were stuck as specky, scrawny gits forever.'Harry did not smile. 'You can't do it if I don't cooperate, you need me to give you some hair.''Well, that's the plan scuppered,' said George. 'Obviously there's no chance at all of us getting a bit of your hair unless you cooperate.''Yeah, thirteen of us against one bloke who's not allowed to use magic; we've got no chance,' said Fred. "
― J.K. Rowling , Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7)
9 " His mouth captured hers, trying to show her with his kiss what he was still learning to express in words. He loved her.He worshipped her. He'd walk across fire for her. He——still had the audience of her three brothers.Slowly breaking the kiss, he turned his face to the side. Anthony, Benedict, and Colin were still standing in the foyer.Anthony was studying the ceiling, Benedict was pretending to inspect his fingernails, and Colin was staring quite shamelessly. "
10 " Sometimes losing a pet is more painful than losing a human because in the case of the pet, you were not pretending to love it. "
― Amy Sedaris , Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People
11 " Not going to walk me to the door?" I asked, pretending to be shocked at his lack of gallantry." Of course I am. many would think that a bonny lass such as yerself wouldst be able to stay out of trouble for a distance of fifteen feet, but I know better." " Did you just use the words yerself and wouldst in the same sentence? You can't be a pirate and a courtier at the same time, Dev. It just isn't done. "
12 " Church was doing what he often did when dropped - lying on his back with all four legs in the air, pretending to be dead in order to induce guilt in his owners. "
― Cassandra Clare , City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments, #5)
13 " What is so often said about the solders of the 20th century is that they fought to make us free. Which is a wonderful sentiment and one witch should evoke tremendous gratitude if in fact there was a shred of truth in that statement but, it's not true. It's not even close to true in fact it's the opposite of truth. There's this myth around that people believe that the way to honor deaths of so many of millions of people; that the way to honor is to say that we achieved some tangible, positive, good, out of their death's. That's how we are supposed to honor their deaths. We can try and rescue some positive and forward momentum of human progress, of human virtue from these hundreds of millions of death's but we don't do it by pretending that they'd died to set us free because we are less free; far less free now then we were before these slaughters began. These people did not die to set us free. They did not die fighting any enemy other than the ones that the previous deaths created. The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names. Solders are paid killers, and I say this with a great degree of sympathy to young men and women who are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor is accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions. We create the possibility of moral choice by communicating truth about ethics to people. That to me is where real heroism and real respect for the dead lies. Real respect for the dead lies in exhuming the corpses and hearing what they would say if they could speak out; and they would say: If any ask us why we died tell it's because our fathers lied, tell them it's because we were told that charging up a hill and slaughtering our fellow man was heroic, noble, and honorable. But these hundreds of millions of ghosts encircled the world in agony, remorse will not be released from our collective unconscious until we lay the truth of their murders on the table and look at the horror that is the lie; that murder for money can be moral, that murder for prestige can be moral. These poor young men and woman propagandized into an undead ethical status lied to about what is noble, virtuous, courageous, honorable, decent, and good to the point that they're rolling hand grenades into children's rooms and the illusion that, that is going to make the world a better place. We have to stare this in the face if we want to remember why these people died. They did not die to set us free. They did not die to make the world a better place. They died because we are ruled by sociopaths. The only thing that can create a better world is the truth is the virtue is the honor and courage of standing up to the genocidal lies of mankind and calling them lies and ultimate corruptions. The trauma and horrors of this century of staggering bloodshed of the brief respite of the 19th century. This addiction to blood and the idea that if we pour more bodies into the hole of the mass graves of the 20th century, if we pour more bodies and more blood we can build some sort of cathedral to a better place but it doesn't happen. We can throw as many young men and woman as we want into this pit of slaughter and it will never be full. It will never do anything other than sink and recede further into the depths of hell. We can’t build a better world on bodies. We can’t build peace on blood. If we don't look back and see the army of the dead of the 20th century calling out for us to see that they died to enslave us. That whenever there was a war the government grew and grew. We are so addicted to this lie. What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us. This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue. It drowns us, drowns our children, our future, and the world. When we pour these endless young bodies into this pit of death; we follow it. "
14 " What, more realistically, is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced” and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life. "
― Seraphim Rose , Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age
15 " I have always been afraid... Always been pretending to follow you closely, alwyas been pretending to sharpen my teeth, when the truth is, I am ... scared to death just treading on your shadow. "
― Tite Kubo
16 " As I looked out at the water, I realized there was nowhere to go, nowhere left to run. And I just had to stay here, facing this terrible truth. I felt, as more tears fell, just how tired I was, a tiredness that had nothing to do with the hour. I was tired of running away from this, tired of not telling people, tired of not talking about it, tired of pretending things were okay when they had never, ever been less than okay. "
― Morgan Matson , Second Chance Summer
17 " It was hard to live normally when you were constantly pretending you didn't see what was going on in front of your face. "
― Cassandra Clare , Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices, #1)
18 " some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems. "
― Chuck Palahniuk , Choke
19 " The truth is .. I'm okay with people not liking me. I'm not okay with them pretending that they do. Keep it real. Everybody ain't for everybody. "
― Nakia R. Laushaul , The Truth as I See It: In Poetry & Prose
20 " ... we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people ... "
― José Saramago , The Cave