Quotes About Truth

Keep in mind that I have seen the answer key.I know what I'm supposed to say to stop you from hitting me.

We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.

You can't tell. That's something I'm learning here in N.Y.C: you have no fucking idea what people are really like. They're not even two-faced--they're, like, multiple personalities.

That's factually crazy...

It had been years since she'd fabricated a story from whole cloth. It brought a sense of returning to an earlier time when she was questioned more often and had fewer evasions at her disposal. Besides, she thought, looking into Rose's relieved and joyful face, people practically told you the lies they wanted to hear.

Why did people have to pretend to be what they already were?

Why study authenticity if not to seek it? Try to ring some last truth from that word before it's so leeched of meaning that becomes a word casing, a shell without a bullet. A term that can be used only inside quotation marks.

The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth.

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious;

She wanted to tell him, to have it out in the open. But that wasn't true—she dreaded telling him. What she wanted was already to have told him.

Her mother glanced at her. "I don't think about him, Anna. That's the truth." "What do you think about?" A spot of red had appeared on each of her mother's cheeks. She was angry. Anna was, too, and the anger strengthened her, as if she were bracing herself against it. "You know perfectly well what I think about," her mother said.

Never part with a fact unless you've no choice.

She's calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

A bright moon can astonish, no matter how many times you have seen it. If you were a child who loved the moon, looking at the moon will remind you of childhood. Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a certain paternal promise. Everyone has a father. A vague story like "Your father died before you were born" may satisfy even a canny child for an unlikely number of years. The truth of your paternity, discovered in adulthood, will make the lie seem retroactively ludicrous.

I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

I would never lie to you, Mica," she lied.

All lies are just truths served more palatably.

I want to find out if lions are real

At every waking moment now, I was plagued by the thought that I was living a lie.

a memoir is meant to be an impression of life, and not a photograph.

The problem is - we own our lives, sure. But our lives don't belong only to us. And yet, we are here to tell our stories in this way to make sense of our lives. So how do you tell a story when you know that telling it will bring other people sorrow? Is it better, in the end, to just be silent?

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

His words stayed with her for years. Each night as she lay waiting for sleep, she tried to re-create the evening in her mind — the tone of his voice, his hand on her shoulder. Soon the memory was worn as an old photograph, the edges fuzzy from frequent handling; she worried that she'd gotten the words wrong, forgotten some nuance of his face or voice. Finally she wondered if she'd made the whole thing up.