Quotes About Truth

I thought it'd be easier here, myself, to live like I wanted to, say what I wanted to say, but it isn't. It's just easier not to, that's all.

More than twenty years later I meet Muriel at a poetry reading at a women's coffee-house in New York. Her voice is still soft, but her great brown eyes are not. I tell her, "I am writing an unfolding of my life and loves." "Just make sure you tell the truth about me," she says.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

We have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.

We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty...

My silences had not protected me. your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.

there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power.

But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don't want to.

We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about - survival and growth.

The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

Don't believe everything they tell you, boy. A watched pot does boil and sometimes you ken tell a book by its cover. Why, iffen there's a naked lady on it, then it ain't gonna show up in no Sunday school class, now is it?

Every trace of illusion was gone—it was nothing but smears of paint, and I quaked at the thought of having believed, and having made others believe, that a painted canvas could be anything but a painted canvas. The veil had fallen from my eyes, and it was just as impossible for me to paint any more as it was to become a child again.

Do you suppose that he would have spoken if he had been alive? And do you suppose that if any of the dead husbands came back they would be believed?

is this carnival, or ... reality?

Yes, you and the Baptists have found the only true faith. You are indeed lucky!

LAURA. Suppose that I was prepared to bear anything, even to being despised and driven out, everything for the sake of being able to keep and control my child, and that I am truthful now when I declare that Bertha is my child, but not yours. Suppose—— CAPTAIN.

You can put law on paper but that don't make it right.

Aunt Ester: He didn't care if anybody else knew if he did or not. He knew. He didn't do it for the people standing around watching. He did it for himself. He say I'd rather die in truth than to live a lie. That way he can say that his life is worth more than a bucket of nails. What is your life worth, Mr. Citizen? That what you got to find out. You got to find a way to live in truth. If you live right you die right.

This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.

The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.

The most I would do was use the shadow tool in Photoshop to bring out the muscular rips in my stomach, which were honestly there. Beneath the fat.

but I am not here ironically; I am here sincerely.

I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was. Only the is.