Jonathan Scheppegrell

“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Do you think you wear a mask?’

‘I’m wearing one right now.’ Valentino smiled softly. ‘We both are.’

‘It’s a sad thought.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But sometimes I wonder about the alternative. Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves?”
― Catherine Doyle, Vendetta

“Like Batman, all of us hide behind our masks and use them to help define ourselves for others. We all have secret identities of a sort, hidden behind our smiling social-networking profiles or our happy church faces. They're not lies, really. They're just not the whole truth, because we know that most of the people we encounter day-to-day couldn't handle the truth (or perhaps we couldn't handle giving it to them).”
― Paul Asay, God on the Streets of Gotham: What the Big Screen Batman Can Teach Us about God and Ourselves