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

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

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

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

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.

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.

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.