Quotes About Truth

this too is true: stories can save us.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. […]And afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

We find truth inside, or not at all.

But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. 'Daddy, tell the truth,' Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' And I can say, honestly, 'Of course not.' Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.

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. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

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.

He got in his car and rolled down the window. 'Make me out to be a good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever.' He hesitated for a second. 'And do me a favor. Don't mention anything about -' 'No,' I said, 'I won't.

This next part,' Sanders said quietly, 'you won't believe.' 'Probably not,' I said. 'You won't. And you know why?' He gave me a long, tired smile. 'Because it happened. Because every word is absolutely dead-on true.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

what is the lesson of history, if not that we owe each other more bread, more friendship, fewer lies, less cruelty.

There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em.

What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?

The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain…

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955.

We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation.

It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.

Timothy B. Tyson

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.

You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what it.

You die when you can't be real, Dolly thought. When you can't see who you are and when you cannot see what is.

Cruelty was fear in disguise and nothing more. And hadn't one of Japeth's holy strangers said that fear itself was nothing more than a failure of the imagination?