“I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”
Maurice Sendak
more infosource: “Maurice Sendak: ‘I refuse to lie to children,'” by Emma Brockes, Guardian, October 2, 2011.
category: children, children's story, innocence, truth, writing
medium: Newspaper article
via: Austin Kleon“Everybody’s got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand the truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one’s work; get on with the business of one’s life.”
David Rakoff
more infosource: “Another Shoe,” in Half Empty (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 224.
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category: school of life, truth
medium: essay
“I’ve often described myself as a literary hermit crab. I scuttle around the currents of literature and find a home in someone’s imagined truth. When that imagined truth is my imagined truth, as a person, there is an amazing connection between the author and me. His voice becomes my voice.”
George Guidall
more infosource: actor who narrates audio books describing his process, in “Art of Storytelling Alive and Well in Audio Books,” Morning Edition, NPR, interviewed by Steve Inskeep, November 16, 2010.
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category: audio book, creative process, literature, publishing, truth, voice
medium: radio story
“If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other human endeavor. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired.”
Jeanette Winterson
more infosource: Art Objects: Essays in Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), epigraph
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category: art, creativity, music, poetry, truth
medium: nonfiction
“There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
Dorothy Parker
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 9.
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category: calisthenics, distance, truth, wisecrack, wit
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 13 of The Paris Review, 1956.
“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.”
Herman Melville
more infosource: Billy Budd and Other Tales (Signet Classics, 1998), revised ed., 85.
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category: edge, honesty, ragged, truth
medium: fiction
“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.”
Proverb
more infosource: see notes below
medium: proverb
notes: The English Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon popularized this proverb in the nineteenth century. In a sermon from 1855, he preached: “If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old Proverb, ‘A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.’” In 1859, the same passage appeared in Spurgeon's Gems. According to Ralph Keyes, author of The Quote Verifier, similar versions appeared in print prior to Sturgeon's sermon. Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, found “Falsehood travels seven leagues while truth is putting her boots on” in an 1854 edition of the Gettysburg Republican Compiler. Researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake discovered “falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is putting her boots on” in a 1820 edition of the Boston Commercial Gazette. And in the 9 Nov. 1710 edition of the periodical The Examiner, Jonathan Swift wrote: “Falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it.”
via: Jolie Holland + Ray Peat“The truth can only hurt a fool.”
taxicab driver
more infosource: as told to Jolie Holland by Edwin, a Nigerian-born taxi driver
category: fool, proverb, truth
medium: conversation
via: Jolie Holland“When you wipe your ass, you don’t send the wad of toilet paper down to the lab and spend a bunch of money having it analyzed. You just recognize it as shit and move on.”
Timothy Freeman
more infosource: a conversation between Dr. Timothy Freeman and Jolie Holland
category: analysis, bullshit, crap, truth
medium: conversation
notes: Dr. Timothy Freeman on not wasting your time trying to figure out what is clearly bullshit
via: Jolie Holland“That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’ That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.”
Stephen Colbert
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