Quotes by American Authors - Page 262

Just … isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?
Rainbow Rowell
Oh, the unintended consequences of perfidy!
Andrew Levkoff
The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
Mark Twain
I lied," I said. ..."I know it," he said."Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something.""I cant," he said."There aint anything to do? Not anything?""I didn't say that," Grandfather said. "I said I couldn't. You can.""What?" I said. "How can I forget it? Tell me how to.""You cant," he said. "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable.""Then what can I do?""Live with it," Grandfather said."Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see that I cant?""Yes you can," he said. "You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should.
William Faulkner
Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them
Stacia Kane
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
Sam Harris
The biggest liar in the world is They Say.
Douglas Malloch
Were you lying?""I never lie," he said piously. "About what?""The sand, the snake."For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question.
Megan Whalen Turner
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.
Sam Harris
The one undeniable benefit of having spent some time in the closet is that it nurtures a talent that you can fall back on any time: lying convincingly. Sometimes I worried that queer kids in the twenty-first century coming out at twelve, or even younger, would never develop that valuable skill.
Bob Smith
Euphemisms persist because lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.
Bergen Evans
Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren't doing so well in class are at even higher risk - students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students. In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adam speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students' grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams.
Dan Ariely
There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.
Stephen King
This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie.
Lemony Snicket
Do we really need a study on why people lie? They lie because it's easy, and cowards are good at "easy." Telling the truth takes moxie, and few have it.
Donna Lynn Hope
By wearing cosmetics a woman seeks to look younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty doesn't require that she issue a continuous disclaimer: "I see you are looking at my face. Please be aware that I don't look this good first thing in the morning.
Sam Harris
Well." Wolfe was judicious. "You were not under oath. The police have been lied to informally many times by many people, including me. The right to lie in the service of your own interests is highly valued and frequently exercised.
Rex Stout
She lied to me today," Archie said."A teenager?" Susan said with faux surprise. "Lying to an authority figure? Impossible.
Chelsea Cain
Liars are exhausting people.
Walter Kirn
Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
Norman Mailer
No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.
Rex Stout
having someone who likes you so much that they think everything you say is the truth has got to be a liar’s paradise
Christopher Paul Curtis
Why are you lying to me? I'm so tired of people lying to me. Do I not deserve the truth? Do I look like someone who can't handle it?
Kasie West
Pretending is another way of lying, and I am so good at both.
Kiersten White
Not telling everything you know is not the same as telling a lie.
Glenda Bailey-Mershon
I try not to take things lying down, especially rectal thermometers
Josh Stern
Why didn't Jacob simply refuse to go along with this bold, obvious swindle? Again, Robert Alter's insights are invaluable. When Jacob asks, 'Why have you DECEIVED me?' the Hebrew word is the same one used in chapter 27 to describe what Jacob did to Isaac. Alter then quotes an ancient rabbinical commentator who imagines the conversation the next day between Jacob and Leah. Jacob says to Leah: 'I called out "Rachel" in the dark and you answered. Why did you do that to me?' And Leah says to him, 'Your father called out "Esau" in the dark and you answered. Why did you do that to him?' His fury dies on his lips. He sees what it is like to be manipulated and deceived, and he meekly complies with Laban's offer.
Timothy J. Keller
We contradict all for which we stand for we all stand for the lie the whole lie and nothing but the lie so help save our lying asses.
Brian Spellman
Lying is second nature and I do it very well. Titus Ray, Chapter 5
Luana Ehrlich
Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.
Sherman Alexie
Okay, you must have forgotten that I know when someone's lying-it's one of my special, freaky priestess gifts, remember-the one you love to use until it becomes inconvenient for you? You can try to throw me off, but even half truths ring false with me.
Amy A. Bartol
I hate that question, “Are you okay?” It’s like asking someone if they think you look fat. You’re almost guaranteed to get a lie.
Hilary T. Smith
Why do older people seem more honest, dependable? But it's true. People think lies are like the food pyramid or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, broad at the base. What does a ninety-year-old have to fib about?
R.A. Nelson
I'm a born liar myself and I know how it's done. You stick as close to the truth as you can. You pretend to volunteer a few bits of information, but the facts are all carefully selected for effect.
Sue Grafton
Meg invited me to come again, but I always had reasons why I couldn't: my schedule was busy, bus fare wasn't cheap. Both of which were true, even if they weren't the truth.
Gayle Forman
When what we say doesn't match how we act, we are lying to ourselves.
Cortney S. Warren
Some people have the experience of being accused of lying when they do not think that they have lied. Circle a number to show what percentage of the time this happens to you.[question from the Dissociative Experiences Scale]
Frank W. Putnam
Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It’s often employed by liars.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
He was lying; I could hear it the way you hear a tune and you know how it goes. I wondered how many times I'd heard him lie, to know so well what it sounded like.
Annie Barrows
The thing about me-the reason Erin can shoot me the wink-and-double-thumbs-up combo-is that I'm your typical good girl. I dress nicely, but I wouldn't say I'm at the bleeding edge of fashion. I always have my homework done on time. I say please and thank you and adults like me. Because of all these things, everyone always assumes that I'll do the right thing. No one ever thinks I would lie. But I do....
Goldy Moldavsky
The tricky part of any lie is trying to figure out how you'd behave if you were innocent.
Sue Grafton
Christina flashed a smile. "I shall ask a million questions of your purply-eyed so that Diana doesn't think about you and Julian or whether you might be at Mr. Rook's."I'm not sure he's a mister," Emma said, stifling a yawn. "I've never heard anyone call him anything but 'hey, Rook' or sometimes 'that bastard.
Cassandra Clare
I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.
Rabih Alameddine
The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.
Sam Harris
A lie to get out of something, or take an advantage for oneself, that’s one thing; but a lie to make life more interesting—well, that’s entirely different.
Diana Vreeland
Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.
Scott Adams
Maybe the problem with lying is that once you start faking it, it's impossible to tell where the make-believe you ends and the real you begins. It's hard to be who you are, but it's even harder to keep up the lie.
Autumn Doughton
They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have they ever given us in return for the trust, the love--They actually say 'love'--we're supposed to owe Them? Can They keep us from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can't believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.
Thomas Pynchon
Stop telling such outlandish tales. Stop turning minnows into whales.
Dr. Seuss
Two half truths don't make one truth.
Joseph Julius Bonkowski Jr.
Lying is second nature to him... More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.
Tony Schwartz
The more we look at anything, the more we see ourselves in the thing. This is called projection. There’s an ethics to projection, an unhinged sense of honesty. Honesty is complicated. The truth is fascinatingly flexible. Lying is boundless. It knows no limits. People lie all the time. Lying is an instinct. It’s human nature. We lie to each other; we lie to ourselves. It isn’t right, but we do.
Kris Kidd
Bound by the Oath against lying, Aes Sedai [carry] the half-truth, the quarter-truth and the implication to arts.
Robert Jordan
Ralon didn't make anyone else put his tack away?" Alex wanted to know. "You didn't see anything stra
Tamora Pierce
The truth never hurts worse than finding out someone you care about lied to you.
Paula Stokes
Because I withered under the glare of an actual invitation, I was a firm believer in preventive prevarication--in other words, lying early in order to free myself later on.
Rachel Cohn
Mike drank straight from the carton, wiped his mouth, and stared at her. "You've been acting freaky. Are you high? Can I have some if you are?
Sara Shepard
The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.
Robert A. Heinlein
The wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.
Mark Twain
The worst part was that I had things I wanted to tell my mother, too many to count, but none of them would go down so easy. She'd been through too much, between my siters-I could not add to the weight. So instead, I did my best to balance it out, bit by bit, word by word, story by story, even if none of them were true.
Sarah Dessen