Quotes About Deception

And if I said because I'm a witch, they'd think I was crazy.' 'That's exactly right,' she confirmed. 'Because everybody knows witches aren't real.' She nodded. 'Yes.' 'Except they really are real.' She continued nodding. 'Mm-hmm.' 'But you also told me Santa and the tooth fairy were real.' 'Those were lies,' she said. 'But they're lies every parent tells their children. So they're not really lies so much as a script.' 'I slept with teeth under my pillow, so it seems like a lie to me.

I realized I'd only seen him at night in dim, flattering restaurant lighting. The sun was not his friend.

Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter.

So he definitely hadn't been angry, and I definitely had believed he was. This meant something inside of me — something I had relied on my entire life — was essentially faulty. My compass, my inner homing pigeon, my deeper instincts. Since mine clearly could not be trusted, I would have to rely on his.

I understood that instead of being a treat for me, the Certs had been a mild compromise for him. By letting me believe they were a special something, just for me, he didn't have to actually think of a special something for me.

But she had wanted it to work so she ignored these things. This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth: you get splinters later on.

There is always dishonesty at the heart of unhappiness.

I was thirty-five and I'd thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I'd been playing in some other game I didn't even know about. Like I'd been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid's face, a naked king with goat's horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect's voice.

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.

But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.

Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others.

The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.

It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious

There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, comdemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

She thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy—she felt a stab of revulsion against that code..

He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn't want me to show it. You wanted an act to help your act...

From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it.

No es lo que no sabes lo que te mete en problemas. Es lo que sabes con certeza pero que no es verdad.»

Los comunistas no se sienten obligados a mantener las promesas que hacen a sus enemigos. A guisa de medios para conseguir sus fines, no vacilan en emplear todas las artimañas y astucias que pueden servirles —y esto incluye las amenazas y las promesas

History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury. — HILARY MANTEL

We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are.

Believe me there's no spiteful stupidity, no horror, no absurd story that one can't get the idle-minded folk of a great city to swallow if one goes the right way about it—