Quotes About Deception

There are so many ways to betray someone. You can whisper behind his back. You can deceive him on purpose. You can deliver him into the hands of his enemy, when he trusts you. You can break a promise. The question is, if you do any of those things, are you also betraying yourself?

Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn't really what's true?

What could it be like to find out, in a matter of minutes, that the person you believed the sun rose and set on was not the person you'd thought?

A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead.

Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface.

That's the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.

I realize how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with.

Time is an optical illusion-- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.

Maybe if you spend your life pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth aren't really yours.

Lies were only as strong as the suckers that believed them.

There are two reasons not to tell the truth--becuase lying will get you what you want, and because lying will keep someone from getting hurt.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

Peter took a shuddering breath. He wondered what his fish had thought, expecting the cool blue of the sea, only to wind up swimming in shit.

You cannot trust perception. Falling, at first, feels like flying.

Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.

Bleeding heart, he'd called her. Well. He should know. He'd been the first to rip it to pieces.

Only the liar knows he's lying

As anyone who's ever contracted it knows, lies are an infectious disease. They slip under the almond slivers of your fingernails and into your bloodstream.

These days her entire life was about making people believe she was someone she wasn't anymore.

You've seen those pictures of couples kissing in front of a Christmas tree, or clasping hands on their wedding day, or holding a newborn baby between them-a snapshot of joy. But what do you really know about them? Just that at the second the shutter clicked, they loved each other. You have no idea what trials came before, or after. You don't know if one of them cheated, if they grew apart, if a divorce loomed on the horizon. You simply see that in one static moment, they were happy.

People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were.

I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

Things don't always look as they seem.

How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.