A Quote by Colson Whitehead

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending. — © Colson Whitehead
A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
You're all Buddhas, pretending not to be. You're all the Christ, pretending not to be. You're all Atman, pretending not to be. You're all love, pretending not to be. You're all one, pretending not to be. You're all Gurus, pretending not to be. You're all God, pretending not to be. When you're ready to stop pretending, then you're ready to just be the real you. That's your home.
When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?
A liberal pretending to be a conservative? That's like a straight person pretending to be gay to get greater acceptance.
My path to wisdom began when I stopped pretending to know things I didn't know. When I explicitly admitted to the limits of my knowledge, stopped building on ambiguity and ignorance, and instead realized that I knew nothing, not even the things I thought I knew.
The moment the light went out, everyone stopped pretending.
Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.
I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge - what kind of monster would fascinate people?
Either you're a person who will be stopped, or you are a person who won't be stopped. You choose.
People look at me as if I were some sort of monster, but I can't think why. In my macabre pictures, I have either been a monster-maker or a monster-destroyer, but never a monster. Actually, I'm a gentle fellow. Never harmed a fly. I love animals, and when I'm in the country I'm a keen bird-watcher.
Infidelity has always existed, but I feel like it was brushed under the carpet, behind the scenes. Now everyone is at it - and they've stopped pretending they're not.
There is a history of gay people pretending to be straight. I want to balance the sides. I'm a straight person pretending to be gay. I've had a lot of people to imitate. It's easy when you're British; we're camp by nature, anyway.
I am excited to show people how, when you get older, you get deeper, you get more raw, you get more honest, and you stop pretending to be the person you think people want you to be. I stopped worrying about what people wanted me to say and just sort of dug deep into my personal arsenal of my mistakes and shameful thoughts.
The monster behind the wall stirred. I'd come to think of it as a monster, but it was just me. Or the darker part of me, at least. You probably think it would be creepy to have a real monster hiding inside of you, but trust me - it's far, far worse when the monster is really just your own mind. Calling it a monster seemed to distance it a little, which made me feel better about it. Not much better, but I take what I can get.
Our culture hasn't stopped objectifying women. We - men and women both - are just getting better at pretending it's not happening.
Racing serves as a formal demonstration of your ability to ride the three-headed monster. The first monster is your physical preparation-lifting weights for strength, running for endurance, working on your technique. The second monster is your mental preparation-all our jabbering about humility, battling for your life, taking complete responsibility for the outcome. The last monster is your X Factor, your soul, your courage. Taken altogether, I call this three-headed monster the Process of Winning.
As a child, one of my defense mechanisms was to try to be funny. My mom tried to nurture that by putting me in acting class. But I got bored when we stopped pretending to be trees and actually had to work.
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