persona

Rumors run wild when one sacrifices for self and temporarily forsakes those who assume entitlement to one's persona.

It's good when a man deceives your expectations, when he doesn't correspond to the preconceived notion of him. To belong to a type is the end of a man, his condemnation. If he doesn't fall into any category, if he's not representative, half of what's demanded of him is there. He's free of himself, he has achieved a grain of immortality.

Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

The most important thing in business is a persona, Nico,' he was fond of saying. 'People want to know immediately what they're dealing with. And when they think about you, you've got to stand out in their minds--like one of those characters in a novel.

(reporter interviewing Broadway dancer Tommy Tune:) 'Do you think that greats like Fred Astaire possessed some kind of magic?'(pause)'No. Magic possesses them'.

I am a strong individual that may seem weak; but, my strength is in my ability to stay in the fight and sure my enemies that I can take the punches; and, still stay strong in my weakness. Because within time God will turn my weak persona to my strength. I will be able to show myself and others that being strong in a weak persona is a sign of humility.

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.

When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all__ecause all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.

Who would you impress if the world was blind?

What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pin things down, it has eyes that can through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.

Most priests wish they were as righteous as they seem to most members of their congregations.

The difference between me and other people is that they all walk around with onion skins wrapped around them. Pre-meditations, pretentions, the faces that they present to the world, the faces that they present to themselves.. onion skins that come in layer after layer. They're on the inside of all that. And I... I am the inside of the onion skin walking around. I am only me.

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind.

They__e called sock puppets. We create armies of artificial online personas _ user accounts that espouse views certain interested parties want espoused. We flood forums, online comment sections, social media. ... It__ amazing what a few people and a little money can accomplish online. Our puppets have turned whole elections. _ Everything the public sees is managed. If there__ a valuable brand to protect _ whether it__ a person or a dish soap _ these fuckers are out there protecting it, shaping the narrative. I mean_ who the hell follows dish soap on Twitter? How does anyone believe that shit__ real? (p. 292-294)

All year long Sylvia had been trying to overthrow her guileless, college girl image. She knew "cottons with big full skirts and university personalities" would have looked hopelessly naive in New York. Sylvia wanted to be hard and urban.

The outfit, tight in places, and loose in some, says as much in the buttons as it does in cuffs.