Quotes About Truth

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.

I wanted not a window on the world but the world itself.

people whose names would tell a different story, although not necessarily to a different hundred people.

I WAS trained to distrust other people's versions, but we go with what we have. We triangulate the coverage. Handicap for bias. Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation. Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak.

The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane.

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I.

They say an unexamined life is not worth living

People always went for the romantic interpretation; you couldn't blame them for that. What they felt most strongly seemed most true. But other forces were operating in the world.

You don't know what you're going to be faithful to in this world, do you? It was true I didn't have what other people had, I knew that, and yet I couldn't think of a single other life I envied - no, I couldn't - though I knew better than to try to get anyone to believe it.

He had never lied to me, as far as I knew. But did I know anything?

He sent Leah a text--*truck fine miss u like always april too all my lv*--and none of it was a lie. There were burning truths in that message.

She understood very well that when you took a good look under a clear, hard light, the world was a fucked-up hellhole. Most people knew this, she'd known this, but nobody wanted to think about it all the time. It didn't pay to forget for too long.

She saw. And, painful though the knowledge was, it was also a relief. She had not failed with Arthur, nor had Morgan stolen him from her. He had belonged to Morgan long before she came into his life.

If I ever see a man in a rug again, I'm not going to believe a single word he says! A man who lies about having hair will lie about anything.

To be closed from everything, and yet to feel, to think...This is the truth of hell, stripped of its gaudy medievalisms. This loss of contact.

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored.

Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Anything that can be dreamed is true.

There's an old Northlands saying that goes like this: When lies don't help. try telling the truth. Loki knew it well, of course, but preferred his own version, which was: When lies don't help, tell better lies.

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.