Quotes About Truth

The truth is that very few understand the truth about forgiveness. It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering into difficulties, think of all the sorrow in the world that would be spared.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I'd believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I'd depended on that, as if on a magic charm.

Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion.

He has something we don't have, he has the word.

The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.

When it came to love, wasn't believing the same as the real thing?

After all you've been through, you deserve whatever I have left, which is not much but includes the truth.

Everybody knew. Nobody admitted to knowing. If other people began to discuss it, you tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable.

Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; so you do, and you think, Now I'm going to find out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true;

The written word is so much like evidence — like something that can be used against you later.

to quote George Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." And to quote him again: three words: Tell. The. Truth.

What you don't know won't hurt you.

But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.

The things I believe can't all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe all of them, all three versions of Luke, at once and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it.

She's truly a woman?" said Aunt Gabbana, eyeing me shrewdly. "Of course," said Paula. "None of that's padding?" said Aunt Gabbana, nodding towards my chest. "Certainly not!" said Paula. "You'd be amazed at what some families try. She has nice wide hips, none of these narrow pelvises. Let me see your teeth, Agnes.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for the trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality. The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

It's like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby's flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.   One

Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotting.