“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”
Steven Millhauser (1943) American novelist and short story writer
Main Street (1920)
“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”
Steven Millhauser (1943) American novelist and short story writer
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
The Mask
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)
“Closet (definition): Basement suite of a heterosexual outhouse.”
Richard Summerbell (1956) Canadian mycologist
Abnormally Happy: A Gay Dictionary (1985)
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
(14th February 1829) Lines on Newton’s Picture of the Disconsolate
The London Literary Gazette, 1829
“Vice knows she's ugly, so puts on her mask. ”
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch
Womanpower (p. 129)
The Female Eunuch (1970)
Context: Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.