Mimicry Quotes

“The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.”
― Oscar Wilde, Reviews

“Listen, then repeat. Listen, then repeat. That was all it took to pretend well. What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Only after becoming somewhat adept in a chosen field of study do most people feel comfortable developing their own distinctive style. More than one successful writer, for example, confessed to beginning their writing career by attempting to write in the same manner as the writers whom they admired. Artists, and other genuine people, are never truly comfortable in a fabricated role, living a life of mimicry, adhering to society’s preconceptions. Each person intuitively seeks to place the stamp of an emergent personality upon their greatest creation, the formulation of their self-identity. A person’s self-identity, similar to works of art, is autotelic, they reflect their maker, and are ends all unto themselves.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Mimicry can be unkind, but at least it acknowledges that you’re there.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19

“This little book has been written in the hope that it may appeal to several classes of readers.

Not infrequently I have been asked by friends of different callings in life to recommend them some book on mimicry which shall be reasonably short, well illustrated without being very costly, and not too hard to understand. I have always been obliged to tell them that I know of nothing in our language answering to this description, and it is largely as an attempt to remedy this deficiency that the present little volume has been written.”
― Reginald Crundall Punnett, Mimicry In Butterflies

“I am not Seamus, who tacks emotions to the outside of his skin and whose words charge from his mouth on horseback. No one sees through me, except Xavier, and he does so not because I choose to give him access but because he knows himself. I will have to offer myself to Seamus, if I want something 'more' with him. Part of me can't believe I'd contemplate it, even for a moment. What do I have in common with an oversized, yarn-spinning, bread-mauling, divorced deliveryman attached to a seven-year-old? The rest of me doesn't know if I remember how to be close to another person. I practice mimicry, a Viceroy butterfly masquerading as a Monarch, a Superb Lyrebird echoing the calls of everything from chickadees to chain saws. I practice stories of my past, telling this sad memory or that scary one, and people feel I'm confiding in them because the words touch their deepest wounds, not because the tales hold any emotional resonance for me. My intimacies, the ones that have become my Sisyphus stones, long-term romantic relationships, the college one, ended with the nice young man shocked when I said I didn't love him and we had nothing in common. "We've spent two years talking about everything," he said.
Yes, mimicry.”
― Christa Parrish, Stones For Bread

“Children, teenagers, and young adults frequently attempt to duplicate their cult hero’s mannerisms. Sometimes when we observe youngsters attempting to emulate the gestures and behaviors of a celebrity whom they admire, we state that they are putting on airs or engaging in pretensions. Adults tend to fob off such pretentious behavior as a frivolous act engaged in by children. In actuality, pretentious behavior is an important learning rubric for behavior and character formation. Imitation is more than a form of flattery. When young people mimic admired celebrities they are displaying telling behavior regarding what subjects spikes their interest and this in turn might provide clues to their future vocational and recreational activities. By engaging in mimicry, we are able to audition our future self. Just as many athletes begin in their youth attempting to impersonate the style of their sports idols, young people universally attempt to copy the mannerisms and behaviorisms of people whom they respect. Mimicry is one way that people feel safe exploring what persona they wish to adopt. How many rock stars and other successful people endorsed the mantra, ‘Fake it ‘till you make it.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Mimicry within mimicry, imperfectly understood idea within imperfectly understood idea: the second-year girl student in the printing department, not understanding the typographical exercise she had been set, and playing with type like a child with a typewriter, avoiding, in the name of design, anything like symmetry, clarity, or logic; the third-year girl student showing a talentless drawing and saying, in an unacknowledged paraphrase of Klee, that she had described the 'the adventures of a line'; and that fourth-year man playing with tools for the peasants. There are times when the intellectual confusion of India seems complete and it seems impossible to get back to clarifying first principles. Which must have been one of the aims of an institute of design: to make people look afresh at the everyday.”
― V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization

“He waves to me with a free arm. He knows one human greeting and by golly he plans to use it.

I wave back. He waves again. I shake my head. No more waving.

He pivots his "shoulders" to rotate his carapace back and forth. He "shook his head" inasmuch as he could. I wonder how we're going to break out of this game of "Eridian See Eridian Do," but he takes care of that for me.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“Every class has pupils who mimic the teachers particularly well and perform for their classmates; a class without such teacher-mimics would have something lifeless about it.”
― Elias Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge: Geschichte einer Jugend

“It was terrible the way resemblances ran wild through the things of the world, the way one place or time mimicked another, making you feel that you were going in circles, going nowhere at all. I looked forward to becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“When we watch another human being making a movement, whether it is sticking out a tongue, carrying packages, swerving, dancing, eating, or clapping hands, our neurons fire in the same way, as if we ourselves were making the movement. From the brain's perspective . . . watching is pretty similar to doing. The brain has a built-in empathic and mimicking capacity. It translates what is seen through the eyes into the equivalent of doing and is structured to absorb and prepare itself for what we may not yet have mastered.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“Once we comprehend the evolutionary function of deception, we stand better equipped to understand why it happens, when it is likely to happen, and who is likely to deceive us.”
― Ptera Hunter, The Wisdom of Loki: The Art of Lying in the Natural World

“Nature is the ultimate teacher, offering lessons in resilience, interconnectedness, and adaptation. We just need to pay more attention.”
― Norbertus Krisnu Prabowo