Truth

"The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head."

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

"The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself."

"In the cherry blossom's shadethere's no such thingas a stranger."

"All around the dining hall, you can feel the rejuvenating effect that a good meal can bring on. The way it can make people kinder, funnier, more optimistic, and remind them it's not a mistake to go on living. It's better than any medicine."

"It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to."

"When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake."

"There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one."

"That is the curse of lying, Sister. Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time."

"My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences."

"Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

"Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true."

"I cannot love a man who cannot protect me."

"A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be."

"At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right"

"For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."

"Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you"

"A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

"It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are."