Truth

"But love wasn't about sacrifice, and it wasn't about falling short of someone's expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here."

"Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth."

"It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth."

"We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN."

"Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that's been burning me up all my life. Truth, I say inside my head again, just for that feeling."

"Every decent con man knows that the simplest truth is more powerful than even the most elaborate lie."

"Why is this so hard?” I whispered. His pulse leaped crazily at my admission. “Everything worth fighting for is hard."

"We are willing to believe anything other than the truth."

"Sometimes we don’t get second chances, Owen. Sometimes things just end.”He winces. “We didn’t even get a first chance."

"The naked truth is always better than the best-dressed lie."

"Beasts bounding through time. Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicinethe impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his townthe impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing histhe impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propellerthe impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troopsthe impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafnessthe impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally madthe impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly"

"Feelings can be like wild animals-we underrate how fierce they are until we've opened their cage"

"Speak the truth do not become angered and give when asked, even be it a little. By these three conditions one goes to the presence of the gods."

"A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar."

"To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual."

"I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it."

"I have always been afraid... Always been pretending to follow you closely, alwyas been pretending to sharpen my teeth, when the truth is, I am ... scared to death just treading on your shadow."

"If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor."

"If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless."

"Hell is truth seen too late."