Quotes About Truth

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe Oh.

I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.

when you're dead, you just have to be yourself.

Fakat ÅŸu da doÄŸru; hikayeler bizi kurtarabilir.

Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?

Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker, Azar said. You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat Go away, Kiowa said. I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal.

you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. Listen

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.

You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To

That's a true story that never happened.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote.

True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. Still

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

The whole world worked by subterfuge and the will to believe.

Just because it never happened doesn't mean it isn't true.

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around" (p89 "Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong")

Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original." (p80 Mitch Sanders in "How to Tell a True War Story")