Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.