Quotes About Truth

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

The American religion—so far as there is one anymore—seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong.

The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.

To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.

I've plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.

As with everything I've ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure. The tarantula ego—starving to be shored up by praise—tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small, true thing is standing in line for me to say.

A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there's suffering involved.

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self—your neat analyses and tidy excuses.

Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up.

You can do "research," i.e. postponing writing, till Jesus dons a nightie. But your memoir's real enemy is blinking back at you from the shaving glass when you floss at night—your ignorant ego and its myriad masks.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain The

Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty.

But unless you're looking at actual lived experience, the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded. You'll never unearth the more complex truths, the ones that counter that convenient first take on the past. A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He's missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.

But whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but the most hardened sociopath—carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are.

You're making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past—inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titillation. You owe a long journey, and most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself.

her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not

Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture.

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. p. xxi

He said, My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a caul over her head like a wedding veil, and I come into this world wearing that same veil. I see what others don't. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

But I still feel awe for us—yes, for the masters who wrought lasting beauty from their hard lives, but for the rest of us, too, for the great courage all of us show in trying to wring some truth from the godawful mess of a single life. To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind. And

Mother's particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth's direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.

My grandma Ruth used to say there's a little felon in the best of us.

the only parts I remember of my childhood are lies I told myself to feel better