Quotes by American Authors - Page 3310

I'd rather hear an ugly truth, rather than an obscure lie.
Ana Monnar
Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.
Paula Danziger
Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference.George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.Martha: Amen.
Edward Albee
Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.
Chaim Potok
If a man has so much heat he burns your skin when he touches you, he's the devil. Run away
Sarah Addison Allen
It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.
E.A. Bucchianeri
There were a hundred shades between a truth and lie, and she knew them all.
V.E. Schwab
I have a theory that as long as you have one good friend, one real friend, you can get through anything.
Dana Reinhardt
All cynics are disappointed idealists. The more stars in the eyes, the harder the fall.
Josh Lanyon
You know the games I play And the words I say When I want my own way You know the lies I tell When you've gone through hell And I say I can't stay You know how hard it can be To keep believing in me When everything and everyone Becomes my enemy and when There's nothing more you can do I'm gonna blame it on you It's not the way I want to be I only hope that in the end you will see It's the Opheliac in me
Emilie Autumn
It is much harder to lie to someone's face.But.It is also much harder to tell the truth to someone's face.
David Levithan
Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.”“Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.
Margaret Mitchell
What was the point of trying to run away if people were going to insist on reminding you of what you were running from?
Morgan Matson
The image isn't reality. Even though we're used to thinking that way alot of the time. We show a kid a picture of a dog and say 'This is a doggie' - but it's not. It's just an image.
L.J. Smith
We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.Then it melts.The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don't know what just happened. They can't remember.
Laurie Halse Anderson
Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.
E.A. Bucchianeri
News flash, Bozo. Don't ever tell a girl to relax. It only makes us madder.
Jess Rothenberg
Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Coffee, she'd discovered, was tied to all sorts of memories, different for each person. Sunday mornings, friendly get-togethers, a favorite grandfather long since gone, the AA meeting that saved their life. Coffee meant something to people. Most found their lives were miserable without it. Coffee was a lot like love that way. And because Rachel believed in love, she believed in coffee, too.
Sarah Addison Allen
The perfect killer has no friends. Only targets.
Brent Weeks
Truth has power. And if we all gravitate toward similar ideas, maybe we do so because those ideas are true...written deep within us. And when we hear the truth, even if we don't understand it, we feel that truth resonate within us...vibrating with our unconscious wisdom. Perhaps the truth is not learned by us, but rather, the truth is re-called...re-membered...-re-cognized...as that which is already inside us.
Dan Brown
you have to be the prude or the slut, and if you pick one, other people hate you for it, and you can’t trust anyone anymore, because they’re all after the same thing, and you see that you can never go back to how was before…
Ned Vizzini
Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
W.E.B. Du Bois
It's often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.
Karen Marie Moning
Now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.
Mitch Albom
Never assume the obvious is true.
William Safire
I didn't want the sun to rise. I didn't want the world to continue turning. I wanted the whole planet put into stasis until I could catch up.
Anna Sheehan
It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.
Ann Druyan
Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
Ernest Becker
Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years.Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person.Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either.It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.
Christopher Hitchens
The greatest art belongs to the world. Do not be intimidated by the experts. Trust your instincts. Do not be afraid to go against what you were taught, or what you were told to see or believe. Every person, every set of eyes, has the right to the truth.
Blue Balliett
They're just words. And words alone don't really mean anything. It's what you feel and what you believe when you say them that matter.
Dana Reinhardt
Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.
Malcolm X
We too, must shatter the mirrors. We must look in to ourselves and root out the distortions until that thing which we know in our hearts is perfect and true, stands before us.
Garth Stein
All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.
David Sedaris
When you hate someone you used to love, and you think he's done something awful - he probably has.
E. Lockhart
Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.
Lauren DeStefano
...oppression is as American as apple pie...
Audre Lorde
Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
Mark Twain
If what he said was the truth, it broke her heart. If what he said was a lie, it was broken anyway.
Christine Feehan
He spoke again as if he hadn’t just shattered his promise and her security. Her house of glass now lay in a pile of shards.
Aleatha Romig
Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
Paul Krugman
All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.
John Green
If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?
Gene Wilder
Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
Robert Brault
The best gifts come from the heart, not the store.
Sarah Dessen
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Tim O'Brien
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.
Janet Fitch
How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.
Ann Brashares
But some secrets are too delicious not to share.
Suzanne Collins
Some truths are truths, no matter who says them.
Patricia Briggs
It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don't, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.
Jon Katz
Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.
Henry Miller
The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.
Chuck Palahniuk
She was reflecting back on a truth she had learned over the years: that people heard what they wanted to hear, saw what they wanted, believed what they wanted.
Jeffery Deaver
Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.
Dorothy Day
People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
Thomas Sowell
Never do anything that you can't admit doing, because if you are that ashamed of whatever it is, it's probably wrong.
Ashly Lorenzana
...we will stand amazed to see the topside of the tapestry and how God beautifully embroidered each circumstance into a pattern for our good and His glory.
Joni Eareckson Tada
I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt.
Cormac McCarthy