A Quote by Steven Millhauser

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

Steven Millhauser

Quote Topics

Conceal Masks Meant More Words

Quote Author

Steven Millhauser
American - Novelist
Born: August 3, 1943

O, what nowadays does science not conceal! How much, at least, it is meant to conceal!

Friedrich Nietzsche

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

Hilda Doolittle

When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.

Catherynne M. Valente

We are talking. It's a shame. What is said is murdered. Our words that will not grow any bigger or any lovelier will wilt inside our bones. Words wither feelings.

Violette Leduc

As a rule, we go about with masks, we go about looking honest, and we are able to conceal ourselves all through the day.

Mark Twain

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel For words, like nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain A use measured language lie's The sad mechanic exercise Like dull narcotic's, numbing pain In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er Like coarsest clothes against the cold But large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

David Mitchell

Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling; The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel.

George du Maurier

Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?

Tom Robbins

I believe there is no one deeper, lovelier, more sympathetic and more perfect than Jesus.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

Arthur Schopenhauer

For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks." Thus I became a madman.