Telling The Truth Quotes - Page 40

• At the time I thought what I had with you and your mother was better than nothing. But if you can't tell the truth to the people you care about the most, eventually you stop being able to tell the truth to yourself.

  Cassandra Clare

  Mother, People, Care

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.869, Simon and Schuster

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• Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Destiny, Men, Order

  "The Brothers Karamazov". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, part 2, book 5, chapter 4, p. 291, 1945.

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• You may lie with your mouth, but with the mouth you make as you do so you none the less tell the truth.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Lying, Mouths, May

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1973). “Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future”, Penguin Classics

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• Tell the truth and read story books;it will take you to the magical moment in a glory night.

  H. G. Wells

  Book, Night, Stories

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• They say the only people who tell the truth are drunkards and children. Guess which one I am.

  Stephen Colbert

  Children, People, Drunkards

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• When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.

  Mark Twain

  Doubt, Enemy, When In Doubt

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• Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way

  Stanislaw Lem

  Book, Different, Way

  Stanislaw Lem (2012). “More Tales Of Pirx The Pilot”, p.11, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

  Louise Brooks

  Real, Writing, Blow

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• its no surprise to me that anyone hardly tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that's dear to you? Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer to them? It's so painful to be next to someone you feel so strongly about and know you can't say the things you want to.

  Henry Rollins

  Smart, Want, Next

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• This business of friendship was a curious thing, almost as difficult to learn as the busuness of acting. Sometimes you were expected to tell the truth, to express your thoughts and your feelings, and then other times what was wanted was a lie, a bit of disguise.

  Gary L. Blackwood

  Lying, Feelings, Acting

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• We didn't exactly believe your story.' Then --?' 'We believed your two hundred dollars.' 'You mean --' She seemed not to know what he meant. 'I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth,' he explained blandly, 'and enough more to make it all right.

  Dashiell Hammett

  Believe, Mean, Two

  1930 The Maltese Falcon,'The Black Bird'

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• In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

  Lauren Groff

  Lying, Writing, Fiction

  Lauren Groff (2012). “The Monsters of Templeton”, p.10, Random House

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• The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.

  Bell Hooks

  Men, Justice, Principles

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• But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.

  Robin McKinley

  Trying, Stuff, Used

  Robin Mckinley (2007). “Dragonhaven”, p.11, Penguin

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• My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. To tell the truth, there's hardly a difference.

  Harry S. Truman

  Life, Music, Wisdom

  "The Wit & Wisdom of Harry Truman".

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• The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

  Mark Twain

  Truth, Lying, Race

  Mark Twain (2002). “Mark Twain's Book for Bad Boys and Girls”, Mjf Books

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• Some would ask which country am I from? We are supposed to tell the truth, [so] we tell them India. Some thought it was Indiana, not India! Some did not know where India is. I said it is the country next to Pakistan.

  Thomas Friedman

  Country, India, Pakistan

  "The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century".

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• The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Sheep, Needs

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.3, Anchor

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• I cannot tell the truth about anything unless I confess being a student, growing and learning something new every day. The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes.

  Sonia Sanchez

  Learning Something New, Views, World

  Sonia Sanchez (2010). “I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays”, p.17, Duke University Press

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• I don't want realism. I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!

  Tennessee Williams

  People, Giving, Magic

  "A Streetcar Named Desire".

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  Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

  Margaret Atwood

  Philosophy, Sight, Medicine

  Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.256, Anchor

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• To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.

  Ismail Kadaré

  Pain, Thinking, Done

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• Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

  John Steinbeck

  Writing, Hardest, Hardest Thing

  John Steinbeck (1990). “Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters”, p.107, Penguin

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• I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

  Dorothy Allison

  Heart, Character, Needs

  Dorothy Allison (2013). “Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature”, p.142, Open Road Media

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• To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants... Life has become impossible.

  Alain Robbe-Grillet

  Girl, Boys, Practice

  Alain Robbe-Grillet (2015). “La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn: Two Novels”, p.11, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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