“If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play ? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber ?... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage ? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.” -Erasmus

our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking
in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with surfaces.
-carolyn kizer

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde






O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face….
-dylan thomas

i have the eyes of a dead pig.
-marlon brando






I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
sits on my lips and defecates.
-Anne Sexton

imagine a blank helpless sort of face, rather like a rose just before you drench it with ddt.
-john cary






An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger…. Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.
-James Baldwin

A mask of gold hides all deformities.
-thomas dekker






the clothe the fiery thought
in simple words succeeds.
for still the craft of genius is
to mask a king in weeds.
-emerson

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes






I wanted a man’s face looking into the jaws and throat of life
With something proud on his face, so proud no smash of the jaws,
No gulp of the throat leaves the face in the end
With anything else than the old proud look:
Even to the finish, dumped in the dust,
Lost among the used-up cinders,
This face, men would say, is a flash,
Is laid on bones taken from the ribs of the earth,
Ready for the hammers of changing, changing years,
Ready for the sleeping, sleeping years of silence.
Ready for the dust and fire and wind.
I wanted this face and I saw it today in an Aztec mask.
A cry out of storm and dark, a red yell and a purple prayer,
A beaten shape of ashes
waiting the sunrise or night,
something or nothing,
proud-mouthed,
proud-eyed gambler.
-Carl Sandburg






On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.
-Bertolt Brecht

lift not the festal mask! -enough to know,
no scene of mortal life but teems with mortal woe.
-scott






Search for nothing any more, nothing
except truth.
Be very still, and try and get at the truth.
And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I?
-d.h.laurence

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
-W. Somerset Maugham






...To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.
-wallace stevens

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
-paul laurence dunbar






The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

I found me in a great surging space,
At either end a door,
And I said: “What is this giddying place,
With no firm-fixéd floor,
That I knew not of before?”
“It is Life,” said a mask-clad face.
-thomas hardy