Quotes About Truth

El maquillaje puede ser una falsedad, pero no si todo el mundo lo lleva. Si todo el mundo va maquillado, el maquillaje se convierte en en la manera en que son las cosas. Y que es la verdad sino la manera en que son las cosas?

A nation is bound not only by the real past, but the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

Há muito que os comissários do gulag se tinham aposentado, com medalhas e pensões. Nem um único comparecera perante a justiça. A Rússia voltara as costas ao passado. Como podia eu entender? Desde o Holocausto, o meu mundo fizera da memória um dever. A Rússia, tal como a China, optara pelo esquecimento. Era assim que as pessoas sobreviviam, dizia o escritor Shamalov. Uma nação não se construía sobre a verdade.

To tell the truth, it is regarding the physical side of marriage that I have always been apprehensive...There so seldom seems to be enough of it, said Miss Teatime.

The Outsider's case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. Life is a journey, not a destination. Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.

justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.

No, Fulton was colored. She understands this luminous truth. Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made plain by her new literacy. In the last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time.

You go on about reasons," Cora said. "Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

It appeared before her one night in the attic like a spark, a small and simple truth

But now that I been out and I been brought back, I nkow there's nothing in here that changes people. In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.

The encyclopedias are empty. There are people who trick you and deliver emptiness with a smile, while others rob you of your self-respect. You need to remember who you are.

Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord's will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass. — CORA

You go on about reasons, Cora said, call things by other names, as if it changes what they are. But that doesn't make them true. ....but we have all been branded, even if you can't see it - inside, if not without.

Elwood never ceased to marvel how you could walk around and get used to seeing only a fraction of the world. Not knowing you only saw a sliver of the real thing.

You go on about reasons, Cora said, call things by other names, as if it changes what they are. But that doesn't make them true. ....It's true though, your complaint. We come up with all sorts of fancy talk to hide things.

No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.

Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren't looking, alluring and ever out of reach. The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest.

The way poor Michael reciting the Declaration of Independence was an echo of something that existed elsewhere. Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

Llamas a las cosas por otro nombre como si así combinaras lo que son. Pero eso no las convierte en verdad.

Maybe everything the slave catcher said was true, Cora thought, every justification, and the sons of Ham were cursed and the slave master performed the Lord's will. And maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass.

But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.

it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation