Quotes About Truth

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.

Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.

and here is Nussie's husband, Ismail the lawyer, who has learned an important lesson from his son's forcep-birth: 'Nothing comes out right in life,' he tells his duck of a wife, 'unless it's forced out.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it. Outside The Whale ( Granta , 1984)

This is our tragedy....our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn't understand it wasn't real.

man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything's slip-sliding around and there's nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.

From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.

When ninety-nine percent of people thought the world was flat," Evel said, "it didn't make the world flat. The world didn't need people to believe it was round to be round. Right now, ninety-nine percent of people are happily having a picnic on a railway track. Which doesn't mean there isn't a train coming down the line, traveling pretty fast. The railway train doesn't need people to believe it's coming, because it's coming.

Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word.

La misión del poeta es nombrar lo innombrable, denunciar el engaño, tomar partido, iniciar discusiones, dar forma al mundo e impedir que se duerma.»

O, Need's a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit.

I don't want to be elite. Am I elite?" "You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual." "Is that the same as fictional?" "Fiction's elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It's what people want.

one man long as a life and thin as a lie

Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.

For the rest of his life that was what he said to anyone who asked—and there were people who asked, because the world is a cynical and suspicious place and, being full of liars, thinks of everything as a lie. Which is what Vidyasagar's story was.

Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives.

A poet's work,' he answers. 'To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

What is the use of stories that arent even true?

Gerçek hemen her zaman istisnai, acayip, beklenmediktir ve neredeyse her zaman kurals?zd?r, soÄŸukkanl? hesaplarla önceden tahmin edilemez.