Truth

"In life there are heads and there are tails however when one starts to excrete thoughts out of the latter and proceed to relieve yourself out of the former than you've become too full of yourself."

"Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away as she could, and then watching to see what would happen next, what would roll back to her, what would have gotten left behind."

"In life there are heads and there are tails however when one starts to excrete thoughts out of the latter and proceed to relieve yourself out of the former then you've become too full of yourself."

"Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing speech. The day she heard “redneck” on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said."

"I didn't see myself as the busty type. Too bad bodies are issued randomly, not selected to match your personality"

"You see, it's really quite simple. A simile is just a mode of comparison employing 'as' and 'like' to reveal the hidden character or essence of whatever we want to describe, and through the use of fancy, association, contrast, extension, or imagination, to enlarge our understanding or perception of human experience and observation."

"The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals."

"He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time."

"She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position. Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where there was an obligation, based on a reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure. There was no duty to reveal everything in response to a casual question by one who had no right to the information."

"Living in this world will change you,” she confides. “It makes me value life. When a friend has a healthy baby, I don’t think it’s normal; I think it’s a fucking miracle."

"The impulse to tell the truth was not as great as the fear of being left off the page."

"But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand."

"Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve."

"Give your children big truths they will grow into rather than light explanations they will grow out of."

"We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself; it never cheapens or debases him who reaches for it but ennobles and honors him."

"But should you ever come to a time when you need to say something upon my behalf, say this, 'The last truth is that there is no magic."

"Truth is an homage that the good man pays to his own dignity."

"Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)"

"Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them."

"If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa."