“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”
“The outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all.”
Main Street (1920)
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Sinclair Lewis 136
American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright 1885–1951Related quotes

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations

The Mask
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

“Closet (definition): Basement suite of a heterosexual outhouse.”
Abnormally Happy: A Gay Dictionary (1985)

(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. ”

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.