I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask.

The persona can eventually become ourselves, or an aspect of ourselves, to the point where we don't know which is the mask and which is the I.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.

A mask tells us more than a face.

Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face.

Are we not like that actor of old time,
Who wore his mask so long his face took
Its likeness?

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration. A face is like a name. It must have happened some time toward the end of my childhood: I kept looking in the mirror for such a long time that I finally believed that what I was seeing was my self. My recollection of this period is very vague, but I know that the discovery of the self must have been intoxicating. Yet there comes a time when you stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself: this is my self? And why? Why did I want to identify with this? What do I care about this face? And at that moment everything starts to crumble. Everything starts to crumble.

What is a face really? It's own photo? It's makeup? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.

The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.

She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.