Quotes About Truth

Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page.

By the time that poem became the story "River of Names,"* I had made the decision to reverse that process: to claim my family, my true history, and to tell the truth not only about who I was but about the temptation to lie.

Shame comes with denial. Fear fattens on lies.

If it's true, I have the absolute right to terrify you with it.

and I saw all over again what comes of pretending that terrible things do not happen. Shame comes with denial. Fear fattens on lies.

Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.

Self-knowledge is not sold on the Rialto. And if it were, few people would buy.

Lymond said gently, Let us bathe in moral philosophy, as in a living river. Double-dealing is my business.

Since I doubt, at the moment, whether I can stomach any hysterical verbiage, suppose we simply say what we mean.

If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt.

It was then that she found that he had laid flat, himself, every defence against her: that she could, if she wished, enter and be received within this, the long-guarded citadel. And so she discovered, fragment by fragment, what he had never told anyone: the inner truth of all those events which, strung together, made up his unruly life.

I have been taught to face reality: an excellent thing.

In order to rule, one must face reality.

I wish to drink to celebrate another proof of something I hold to be true: that what is mathematical is divine, and what is divine is mathematical, and that a transfusion of both creates the flame which is known as beauty.

You know we believe Philippa.' 'Perhaps I envy her,' Lymond said. 'No one believes me.

And did you mean to honour your promise?" Sybilla said.

A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic.

I don't bed with children.' 'Rumour says,' said Catherine d'Albon, 'that you did. Or are the Knights of St John all mistaken?' 'You know too much,' said Francis Crawford slowly. 'Shall I amend it? I don't bed with young girls who are virgins, unless they ask me, and unless I am married to them.

And Richard was silent, for the truth Jerott had seen touched him, too, for a moment before he thrust it aside. He said, instead, 'Once, I returned, by mistake, a present you gave me.' As when he had come in, fresh from the wind, surprise and pleasure roused, for an instant, all the colour in his brother's face. Francis Crawford said, 'I have kept it, in case one day you might want it. If you do … It makes worthwhile this part, at least, of the journey.

I am good?' said the strained treble. 'Thou art good,' said Francis Crawford in a dry voice.

Daniel Hislop, the son of the bishop?' 'The Bishop's bastard,' said Hislop, with a cold-eyed assumption of coyness. 'Sir. My lord. Jesus.' Lymond's eyes turned to him, open. Then changing position, he seated himself, and placed his hands gently on the table before him. 'Sir will do,' said Lymond calmly, 'unless you receive divine witness to the contrary.

He said, 'Then you don't know, Philippa, what I am.' 'I know what you think you are,' Philippa said.

Truth's nothing but falsehood with the edges sharpened up, and ill-tempered at that: no repair, no retraction, no possible going back once it's out.

I told a lie. You must forgive me. I broke an oath, letting him perish. Should I have chosen him to survive, knowing his heritage?