Quotes About Truth

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion.

Another thing I figured out, after a few days in the house on Desert End Road: what Xandra and my dad really meant when they said my dad had "stopped drinking" was that he'd switched from Scotch (his beverage of choice) to Corona Lights and Vicodin.

We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are.

no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe

A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.

Walk your talk.

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, had made both sides see themselves as they are.

If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn't just occur. It's not like a scientific event. It's a human event.

Imagine emptying a feather pillow from the roof of your house, then trying to pick up every feather. It is seemingly impossible for us to imagine gathering all the feathers back into the pillow, so would you never be able to get the rumor you told about someone back from everyone who heard it. - analogy of the 8th Commandment by Sister Marion

I have ever preferred that a man should tell me face to face that he will or will not do a thing, than to promise to do it and then to not do it.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

A writer is the conscience of the world.

What you don't understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people other people don't believe. Hard lines.

A continuity isn't necessarily right, just because it's a continuity.' 'Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is

themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable … in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

Es terrible destruir la imagen que una persona tiene de sí misma en aras de la verdad o cualquier otra abstracción. ¿Cómo saber si será capaz de crear otra que le permita seguir viviendo?

they seem unable to retain this very simple truth for long, although they have been told again and again, and this is because of another and most powerful feature of their thinking, which is that anything they are told is distorted to fit their own particular personal or group bias and then added, like another pebble to the pile of the half-truths they already cherish.

as far as I can see, everyone is mad. Do you know Matty, that's the only explanation for the world that I can see -- everyone's as mad as hatters... Mad. All of us. Everyone.

Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody.

Myth doesn't mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.

But the majority will continue to insist—speaking metaphorically—that black is white, and after a period of exasperation, irritation, even anger, certainly incomprehension, the minority will fall into line. Not always, but nearly always. There are indeed glorious individualists who stubbornly insist on telling the truth as they see it, but most give in to the majority opinion, obey the atmosphere.