Faking It Quotes

“dear today,

i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.”
― Nina LaCour, Hold Still

“How many more of us are faking the facade? How many more of us are pretending to be something we're not? Even better, how many of us will have the courage to be ourselves regardless of what others think?”
― Katie McGarry, Dare You To

“If you aren't rich you should always look useful.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“This is making me crazy. I hate relying on other people to save me, I hate being clingy, I hate it, and every time you show up, I lean on you. - Matilda Scarlet Veronica Betty Vilma Goodnight”
― Jennifer Crusie, Faking It

“Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.”
― Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays

“That might work," I said. "I'm good at faking it."

This led to a couple moments of uncomfortable silence from both of us.

"You didn't mean... ?" Morelli asked.

"No. Of course not."

"Never?"

"Maybe once."

His eyes narrowed. "Once?"

"It's all that comes to mind. It was the time we were late for your Uncle Spud's birthday party."

"I remember that. That was great. You're telling me you faked it?"

"We were late! I couldn't concentrate. It seemed like the best way to go.”
― Janet Evanovich, Eleven on Top

“I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Sex. You can't lie to yourself sexually. If you don't want it, it's the most disgusting thing in the world.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“Would it make you feel better if I pretended not to be making it up as I go along? [...] In that case, I know exactly what I'm doing, but please don't ask me about it in any great detail.”
― Eddie Robson, Doctor Who Unbound: Masters of War

“Men!"
"At least we don't fake it."
"Listen, it was your uncle. And we were late, remember? So I made the sacrifice and got us there in time for dessert. You should be thanking me."
Morelli's mouth was open slightly and his face was registering a mixture of astonished disbelief and wounded, pissed-off male pride.
Okay, it wasn't that much of a sacrifice at the time, and I knew he shouldn't be thanking me, but give me a break here... this wasn't famine in Ethiopia”
― Janet Evanovich, Eleven on Top

“Things I need: The Californian sunshine. A more convincing smile.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“She was the quintessential twenty-first-century woman: She could build a high-rise in a Chanel suit and Jimmy Choos, give lessons in multitasking, and freeze the heart of the coldest competitor with a single unblinking gaze over the rim of her ebony-framed reading glasses. But that persona was like a bodysuit that she pulled on at eight in the morning and peeled out of at five in the afternoon.”
― Donna Ball, A Year on Ladybug Farm

“Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“I didn't mean to hurt anyone, he tries to tell them. I just wanted to be seen, and loved for who I am. The problem was, it was all a misunderstanding. I pretended to be a good person, and then I couldn't stop.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“And all that time, Franca contained in her breast a storm of anguish and violence so terrible that she had at times, when she was alone and longing to 'break down', to clutch her breast with a fierce answering force to keep the black horror from spurting forth. Her face was calm and benign, always in company, and usually alone too, for she was aware that to play such a part properly allowed of no rest periods, no weak moments of unmasking. She must continue, in her deceit, whole, like the spy who, in order to go on, has to become what he seems. She was, daily, amazed at herself, at her self-control; and at the terrible demons which fed upon her, and in doing so, she realised, fed her. She had begun to need her rage and her hate, even of late her fierce cruel fantasies. She could not, and did not try to, riddle out, rationally order, explain, least of all banish, these horrible consolations, As it seemed, if she were not to die of her love she had to poison it; and even, over its death agonies, to exult. As the days went by, Franca cherished and nourished and developed her suffering, unable to envisage any change or any plan — any machine into which so much relentless force might be fed. Indeed she was afraid to plan or picture a different future of any kind. So long as she stayed silent she had a secret weapon. If she spoke, if once there were the least word, the least crack or fissure, upon which tears and screams could follow, she would have lost her one advantage, her source of ordinary viable life, and would be utterly undone and destroyed.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“knotted up; frayed; faked own death; kept showing
up in new clothes, new names; then leaving”
― Franny Choi, Soft Science

“Hundreds of nights I'd chosen not to cry. Thousands of moments I worried about worrying. That if I did it, I'd make things worse for my parents. That I needed to be strong. That I needed to be happy so I wouldn't drag them down.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Oh, my God, Ted," she moaned, fakely.

They dated for the next four months.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“Using covertly acquired information to feign a mysterious psychic bond was a new realm of deception for Ted.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This

“She stood there awkwardly, incapable of further theatre.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“Mary thought suddenly, this is an abomination, sitting here and having this conventional conversation when I feel so desperate and deprived and torn inside. She thought, is there nothing I can do about it?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“If you were my age, I'd pretend I was happy ... but I'd be faking it.... My problem is discovering what not faking is - ...because my bearings are always pitched as to who I ought to be, not to who I am, to what I should have, not to what I never knew I craved, to life as I found it, not to the life I've let myself think was only a dream.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“I found that the more "authentic" I was, the more followers I won, and the more those followers "liked" me. If that sounds patronizing, I honestly don't mean it that way. Sorry, the Sisterhood, but when it comes to online life, women just don't respond well to other women's success-if comparison is the thief of joy, Instagram is the cat burglar of contentment.”
― Ellery Lloyd, People Like Her

“But what if I don't like anything as much as I pretend to”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“Faking it was the only way she could keep the visions away. When you think there's going to be great change and it doesn't happen--what else is there to do but fake being who you once were? [Padanaram]”
― Peter Orner, Maggie Brown & Others: Stories

“Being a functional member of society is overrated. It’s also surprisingly easy to fake.”
― Angelo Marcos, Victim Mentality

“Maybe she won’t dance. Just sort of sway. Sway and smile.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Jesus is asking me and the rest of the people in the world to stop faking it. He wants us to fight the temptation to merely have the right wrapper and instead be exactly who He made us to be and who we are right where we are.

None of us want to make God look bad. But in the end, being fake makes God look worse. It makes people think He tastes like Crisco.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Put on your lipstick and a nice pair of shoes, hold your head up high and act as if you did nothing wrong. Half the people you meet don’t care about the truth, they only care about how you carry yourself.”
― Kristy McGinnis, Motion of Intervals

“Walking with a bopping limp that suggests you have survived your share of street fights, yelling a lot, wheeling your eyes around angrily—these were learned behaviors among ghettoside men, affections they adopted as preemptive defense against attack.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America