Pretending · the face you wear out
Quotes about pretending to be okay
For the smile you wear out, and the person underneath it.
One verified literary line a day. A private place to write what it brings up.
“I’m fine.” Everyone says it. These writers wrote about the mask — the grin, the act, the face for other people — and what it costs to keep it on.
“We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile”
This is one line. The rest of the Pretending thread is inside Saudade — one line a day, chosen by a person, with a private page to write what it brings up. Over the weeks, your pages become a book of your own.
Read tomorrow’s lineWriters in this thread
- Petrarch on masks
- La Rochefoucauld on masks and self-interest
- Henri-Frédéric Amiel on masks and resentment
- Claude McKay on masks and resentment
- Arthur Schopenhauer on masks and resentment
- Ralph Waldo Emerson on masks and resentment
- Anton Chekhov on masks and resentment
- Jean de La Bruyère on masks and self-interest
- Oscar Wilde on masks
- Blaise Pascal on masks and self-interest
- William Blake on resentment and masks
- Mark Twain on masks and resentment
- Fernando Pessoa on masks
- Luigi Pirandello on masks
- Jessie Fauset on masks
- T. S. Eliot on masks
- Murasaki Shikibu on masks
- Booker T. Washington on masks
Their lines arrive one a day, inside the app.
For readers, writers and artists
For readers, poetry lovers, and anyone who keeps a short private writing habit. Every day’s line can be a prompt: writers can use it to find a place to begin, poets a first line, painters and illustrators a mood. Nobody reads your page but you.
Try this
Make a self-portrait of the face you wear out, then one of the face underneath.
Why these lines
Every line in Saudade is chosen by a person, quoted word for word from the original book, and carries its author, source and year. Nothing is generated, paraphrased or scraped. Never AI.
Most quote sites are full of lines nobody ever said. Ours you can look up.