In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me. Barbara Ehrenreich
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I was smiling yesterday, I am smiling today and I will smile tomorrow. Simply because life is too short to cry for anything. - Santosh Kalwar

  2. And then he gives me a smile that just seems so genuinely sweet with just the right touch of shyness that unexpected warmth rushes through me. - Suzanne Collins

  3. More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate. - Roy T. Bennett

  4. Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people. - Roy T. Bennett

  5. Oh no. Don't smile. You'll kill me. I stop breathing when you smile. - Tessa Dare

More Quotes By Barbara Ehrenreich
  1. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is...

  2. Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more...

  3. I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which...

  4. Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

  5. The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there...

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