Truth

"I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them"

"Crying can bring relief, as long as you don't cry alone."

"Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’."

"Guidance counselors always love to say, 'Just think positively,' but that's impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster. My body is an efficient happy-though-killing machine."

"Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter."

"When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth."

"Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean."

"Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals."

"Personal perception of perfection is like that. You see what you want to see. After awhile you just see what you need to."

"Hope is for people who can't see the Truth."

"Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth."

"If I don't eat junk, I don't gain weight."

"lies, truth, love I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of it's charms."

"I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me."

"The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood."

"If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves."

"In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it."

"We are not sheep or cows. God didn’t create fences for us or boundaries to contain our nationalities. Man did. God didn’t draw up religious barriers to separate us from each other. Man did. And on top of that, no father would like to see his children fighting or killing each other. The Creator favors the man who spreads loves over the man who spreads hate. A religious title does not make anyone more superior over another. If a kind man stands by his conscience and exhibits truth in his words and actions, he will stand by God regardless of his faith. If mankind wants to evolve, we must learn from our past mistakes. If not, our technology will evolve without us."

"Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth."

"There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism."