Quotes by Authors - Page 5005

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
Erica Jong
The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
Franz Kafka
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Simone de Beauvoir
In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's.
Gayle Forman
[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
Clive Barker
The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them.
Rachel Maddow
Nothing is yet in its true form.
C.S. Lewis
I was in my bed trying to figure out why sometimes you can wake up and go back to sleep and other times you can't
Stephen Chbosky
In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him.
Kristin Cashore
...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Richard Dawkins
The truth may not set you free, but used carefully, it can confuse the hell out of your enemies.
Laurell K. Hamilton
A man will never love you or treat you as well as a store. If a man doesn’t fit, you can’t exchange him seven days later for a gorgeous cashmere sweater. And a store always smells good. A store can awaken a lust for things you never even knew you needed. And when your fingers first grasp those shiny, new bags…
Sophie Kinsella
One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths.
Al David
Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.
Max Brooks
My bullshit meter is reading that as 'false'.
Charlaine Harris
I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life.
Alison Goodman
I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
Hermann Hesse
Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.
Myra McEntire
An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.
E.A. Bucchianeri
The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort
Katherine Dunn
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.
David Foster Wallace
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.
Philip Roth
It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.
J.D. Salinger
Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
Khaled Hosseini
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You're so easy to read but the book is boring me.
Emilie Autumn
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
Carl Sagan
The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.
Holly Black
Expectations make people miserable, so whatever yours are, lower them. You'll definitely be happier.
Simone Elkeles
She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process. My mother was Dauntless.
Veronica Roth
Sometimes what we want isn't what we need.
Gena Showalter
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.
Brené Brown
What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.
Helen Keller
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Søren Kierkegaard
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
Chuck Palahniuk
I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like. Snow thought the Hunger Games were an efficient means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.
Suzanne Collins
I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?
Laurie Halse Anderson
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
Daphne du Maurier
I love the stars.Because they can't say anything.I love the stars.Because they do not judge anyone.
Natsuki Takaya
I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.
Scott Westerfeld
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.
Cormac McCarthy
Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."(Journal entry, 14 October 1922)
Katherine Mansfield
Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.
Santosh Kalwar
Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
IRVIN D.YALOM
Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.
Moderata Fonte
Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.
Darren Shan
We don't get to chose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.
Kami Garcia
I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
Orson Scott Card
There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul.
José N Harris
The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
Pema Chödrön
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams
How hurtful it can be to deny one's true self and live a life of lies just to appease others.
June Ahern
You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.
John Waters
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
Flannery O'Connor
Does truth have a moral?
Rick Riordan
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.
Robin Hobb
Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don't know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn't you. That isn't you at all.
Leila Sales
The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.
Brent Weeks