Quotes About Truth

Death, she decides early, is simple. One dies and makes the grass and flowers grow. Everything else is a crock of shit.

Dale stepped over to the large console radio and wrestled it away from the wall. The inside was empty. No wires, no tubes, no lights for the dial, no works at all. Dale looked at the interiors of the other radios he'd listened to over the past two months. All empty.

Occam's Razor: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually the correct one. —William of Occam, fourteenth century Darwin's Blade: All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity. —Darwin Minor, twenty-first century

There was just a speck in the center of this T-shirt. But the speck grew larger—became a shirtless man walking toward the viewer—and pretty soon you could see the rapidly approaching man's face. Vladimir Putin.

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

Glorious beyond compare is the heavenly city. There, victory is truth, dignity is holiness, peace is happiness, life is eternity" (ll:29).

Faction is a dangerous thing—presenting readers, viewers, and listeners with a fictitious account and making them think that it is true.

They're just words. And words alone don't really mean anything. It's what you feel and what you believe when you say them that matter.

Lies destroy you

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.

Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

morning was true will by evening have become a lie.

All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn't known: the secret was me.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

course, if you haven't received

Somewhere, a clock ticks. Sand pours through the hourglass. I am no longer interested in the stories but rather, what is underneath the stories: the soft, pulsating thing that is true.

The hidden disaster was secrecy, the pretense and magical thinking, the certainty that no one ever needed to know.

This is a work of nonfiction.

If it wasn't thought, it wasn't so. If it wasn't spoken, it hadn't happened. Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head. The hard work is in learning to step back and analyze the data dispassionately.

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head.

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.