Quotes About Deception

You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot

While I was now fairly demoralized, as well as aflame with the prospect of an hour in his daughter's arms, the thought of using his car to debauch his bourgeois paradise was a perfidy at which I drew the line.

There is a point when life, having showered us with jewels for nothing, begins to exact our life's blood for paste.

Romantic ardor is in basic principle Lethean. Its purpose is temporarily to blind us to one another; make us forget the low esteem in which we really hold one another, and in which we quite deserve to be held; the anesthetic administered to reason without which the race would not go on.

When the weatherman spoke he did so in smooth, rolling clauses, full of long words such as schoolmasters use when they are teasing a favored pupil, but he told them very little about himself. His talk was like cotton candy, that huge sweet bauble that fills the eye but leaves little in your belly when you've eaten it.

I cheated," the Cat said, and rested a finger on her lips. "Bad lady that I am. I used a small insert." She grinned at the companions, who glared back at her through clenched teeth. "And it was quite difficult to insert, wasn't it, girls? You know, I actually had to hold them down to do it, there was so much girly squealing and wiggling. And look at them now, happy to do as they're told.

They know what we're planning, and we know what they're planning. But they don't know we know.

He could have walked in through the main gate and they'd never know. Usually. And that was the one thing that Adam had lectured him about ceaselessly. There was no usual.

You're wrong," she said. "Both of you. If I know anything now, it's that our religions are lies. Horrid, dirty lies. I don't believe in God, or destiny, not any more.

Our perception of the Silfen as gentle and kind is our own stupid, convenient illusion. We wanted to believe in elves. And how many human bodies lie out there under the snow because of that?

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way.

Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it's never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you say is a lie.

I'll come, you'll see,' I said. I knew it was a lie, she knew it, too.

Europeans need easy explanations; they will always choose a simple lie over a contradictory truth.

Reality confounds image.

What I'd noticed was that here, in the windshadow of the mountain, it often smelled like rain. It might be raining up on the ridge, I might see the veils and rags of rain hanging down out of the scudding clouds, I might see shrouds of rain hauled over the country the way a fishing boat might drag a net, but—no rain here. A spatter, maybe, then nothing. Willy told me when I first moved in that it was like living in a strip bar. So close, looks so good and you never get laid.

Satan's extortion is powerless without the addiction to a good public name.

Satan loves to name you, because names catch people, control people, and shape people. This world love[s] to name us. We're susceptible to names because [we believe] we're orphaned and widowed--we're so desperate, we believe them. But the one we let name us is our idol...our god our father and groom.

In a Godless universe, what is the difference between doing unto others that we would wish them to do unto us, and merely appearing to do unto others that we would wish them to do unto us? The answer, alas, is that if there is no God who knows the secrets of our hearts, it is all too easy to appear to be good, and even to do formally good deeds, all of which are empty of real goodness.

It's a phenomenon that I've often observed without understanding it. Inside someone another person can exist, a fully formed, generous, and trustworthy individual who never comes to light except in glimpses, because he is surrounded by a corrupt, dyed-in-the-wool, repeat offender.

Never join a conspiracy that you could possibly betray, because if you could, someone else will.

All men lie. That's how they operate. if you want a longterm relationship with a man you've got to understand it's going to be with a liar. It's in their nature - it's genetic, it's a bloody Darwinian acquired characteristic for survival, OK? They tell you what they want you to hear.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God really say, ëYou must not eat from any tree in the garden?í”

“You will not surely die,” the serpent told her.