Quotes About Deception

Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he cheats? Yes, said Kate—that's the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with what they think of their friends.

But I care myself if I tell fibs; I never tell them unless there's something rather good to be gained.

His egotism lay like a serpent in a bank of flowers.

She lost herself in infinite dismay when she thought of the magnitude of his deception.

I want to bring them down,—down, down, down! I want to turn the tables upon them—I want to mortify them as they mortified me. They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth! I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.

He should see nothing, he should learn nothing; for him she would always wear a mask.

of a spying servant, on the other side of

I don't know what's the matter with you, she observed to him once; but I suspect you're a great humbug.

He had none of that wish to appear deep which is at the bottom of most forms of fatuity; he was perfectly willing to pass for decently superficial; he only aspired to be continuous. When you were not suitably shallow this presented difficulties; but he would have assented to the proposition that you must be as suitable as you can and that a high use of subtlety is in consuming the smoke of your inner fire. THE FIRE WAS THE GREAT THING, NOT THE CHIMNEY.

BOOK ELEVENTH

They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything.

Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the face now of Jim's silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real?

ignis fatuus.

I am convinced that we are living in a fool's paradise, that the ground is heaving under our feet. It's not the ground my dear; it's you that are turning somersaults, Madame Grandoni interposed. Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.

Then it hasn't been love, said May Bartram. Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable, he explained.

Vertrauen ist das Gefühl, einem Menschen sogar dann glauben zu können, wenn man weiß, dass man an seiner Stelle lügen würde.

Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.

Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar.

Maybe I only thought I was in love. Maybe I was simply hungry, lonely, a clay pigeon any one could put away with a toy pistol.

From the time you wake up until the moment you go to bed it's all a lie, all a sham and a swindle. Everybody knows it, and everybody collaborates in the perpetuation of the hoax. That's why we look so goddamned disgusting to one another.

I am so thoroughly healthy and empty. No dreams, no desires. I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten

They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once did they opened the door that leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark.

to love or be loved is no crime. the really criminal thing is to make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love.