Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.

At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy.

Was the last face the real one?

No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)

You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.

"I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite <i>look</i> like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's life."

I shrugged again, and smiled. "This is my life," I said. "It doesn't seem like the wrong one."

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

Pretend to be something you’re not until you are — fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them.

It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.

He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be. He’d simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was. I’ve seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men — homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter. In their faces — plenty of them were handsome, but ruined — I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.

...I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made...

I am I, and I wish I weren't.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.