Quotes About Truth

Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.

If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.

C'est cela l'amour, non? Avouer là où l'on hésite, là où on faiblit.

But you are what you do, not what you say you are.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth.

The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit.

Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one's cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit.

Forster] quotes approvingly from this discussion, from The Magic Flute [by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson] Lord Buddha was your gospel true? True and False. What was true in it? Selflessness and Love. What false? Flight from Life.

Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

But it's my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is "the family" is always an event of some violence. It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.