Public Image Quotes

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriel García Márquez: a Life

“Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitably present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“She could pretend that it was not grief, that insurmountable pain you were meant to climb over like a few pebbles. She had public, political problems now; the kind of problems that everyone treated as real”
― E.J. Beaton, The Councillor

“When identity is derived from projecting an image in the public realm, something is lost, some core of identity diluted, some sense of authority or interiority sacrificed. It is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen and hiding. And time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? Going unseen may be becoming a sign of decency and self-assurance. The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, propriety, autonomy, and voice. It is not about retreating from the digital world but about finding some genuine alternative to a life of perpetual display. It is not about mindless effacement but mindful awareness. Neither disgraceful nor discrediting, such obscurity can be vital to our very sense of being, a way of fitting in with the immediate social, cultural, or environmental landscape. Human endeavor can be something interior, private, and self-contained. We can gain, rather than suffer, from deep reserve.”
― Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

“She felt, for the first time in years, like herself. Not the public, painted-on Daphne that she showed the world, but the real seventeen-year-old girl she kept carefully hidden beneath.”
― Katharine McGee, American Royals

“We have this sort of false self we portray over the internet. It’s a facade of highlights we believe our peers will deem noteworthy.”
― Chris Matakas, #Human: Learning To Live In Modern Times

“She could pretend that it was not grief, that insurmountable pain you were meant to climb over like a few pebbles. She had public, political problems now; the kind of problems that everyone treated as real”
― E J Beaton, The Councillor

“Here was my generation; lost of all hope, bereft of all ideas, struggling between a desire to be left alone, and a push by the crowd to be out in the crowd itself; to be there, captured in a photograph, swinging between dances and clubs and selfies in late-night booze ups between this side of heaven and the not-so-great other side; flung out onto walls and celebrated as celebrities, silent and still in cheap all-night bars; cheap nights and cheap regrets; no religion; post-morality; losing out on cold winter mornings with outcasts and nerds despised by a growing group of same-thinkers, self-fostering a public image of themselves; when their private lives were oh so sad and lonely, scrolling through feeds of parties they were at or were never at all, hoping to God that their dreams would still exist come morning.”
― Joshua Krook, A Thing Beyond Hope