lying Quotes

“Of course, being a financial journalist is not the career I always wanted. No one who writes about personal finance ever meant to do it. People tell you they “fell into” personal finance. They’re lying. What they mean is they couldn’t get a job writing about anything more interesting.”

“But before I could say anything, Myers blurted out, ‘I lied. Everything I said at McMillian’s trial was a lie. I’ve lost a lot of sleep and have been in a lot of pain over this. I can’t be quiet any longer.‘”

“I’m not bragging when I say that I’m one of the best liars in the world but I got to tell you, Todd was pretty doggone good. It seemed like he knew some of the things I know, the things I think of all the time and try to remember so I don’t make the same mistake more than seven or eight times.”

“Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense.”

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.”

“There are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the like they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear a some kind of concession, a settlement with truth.”

“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can.”

“What fault do you find with them? A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.”

“I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?”

“What I want to tell you is, I think the English patient is not English.”

“I didn’t say you threw it. I just said ‘Run.’ You should’ve run.”

″So who were you? I saw your height and your hair, but I couldn’t see your face clearly enough. Still, you gave yourself up, Tyler. And for some reason, telling me you were nowhere made your eyes twitch and your forehead break into a sweat.”

“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.”

“Once I saw them lying three deep. In a space not exceeding a hundred yards square more than four hundred corpses lay festering. Can you imagine the postures in which man, once created in the image of his Maker, had been twisted? Do not try, for were you to succeed you would ask yourself, with me: ‘Can I ever forget.”

“Now Minnie likes just about everybody, but she sure don’t like Mexicans. So when you tell me, Minnie went to North side to visit her mama? Well I find that highly unlikely, but okay. Maybe.”

“I didn’t know what to say. I mean, what can you say when you’ve just found out your friend’s a liar! Nancy washed her hands and face. I handed her two paper towels to dry herself. “Are you okay?” I asked. I felt kind of sorry for Nancy then. I want my period too, but not enough to lie about it.”

“Little lies that make people feel better are not bad, like thanking someone for a meal they made even if you hated it, or telling a sick person they look better when they don’t, or someone with a hideous new hat that it’s lovely. But to yourself you must tell the truth.”

“I couldn’t believe my grandmother would be lying to me. She went to church every morning of the week and she said grace before every meal, and somebody who did that would never tell lies. I was beginning to believe every word she spoke. ”

“Mr. Valentine would never do something like that! Katherine said he couldn’t even bring himself to shoot a wolf cub! You’re lying!”

“With every second that went past, with every sentence she spoke, she felt a little strength flowing back. And now that she was doing something difficult and familiar and never quite predictable, namely lying, she felt a sort of mastery again, the same sense of complexity and control that the alethiometer gave her.”

“It wasn’t that she couldn’t lie to him. She could lie to anyone and make it good, if she had to—she’d certainly discovered that. But she didn’t want to, not to him or to Windy.”

“Here’s why, diary. Because I’m lying in bra and pants in stifling heat on a new bed in a new twin-bed room in the new Olympic village in Rome and somehow we’ve lost twelve hours and the dates are wrong.”

“Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”

“We lie to those we love.”

“Oh, I’m so tired, so tired of it all, of myself, of lying and thinking up lies, and not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth.”

″... she didn’t tell the government about that in case she lost her pension. Which meant she was lying to them, even though she was always going mad at me for lying, except in my case I thought of it as decorating statements to make them sound more interesting.”

“Also, you’ll find out soon enough that John distorts—when he isn’t out-and-out lying. For example, in Problems in American Democracy the other day, Mr. Weiner asked him what kind of homes early American settlers lived in, and John said tree huts. Now John knows early American settlers didn’t live in tree huts, but he’ll do just about anything to stir up some excitement.”

“For instance, he used when he was young to find it difficult to tell the truth always, but he wasn’t a very clever liar, because he couldn’t help blowing softly through his trunk when he was telling a lie...”

“She had bribed a teacher. She had stolen opium. She had burned herself, lied to her foster parents, abandoned her responsibilities at the store, and broken a marriage deal. And she was going to Sinegard.”

“Sara Godfrey was lying on the bed tying a kerchief on the dog, Boysie. ‘Hold your chin up, Boysie, will you?’ she said as she braced herself on one elbow.”

″‘And if anyone asks, you’re Chinese.’ The boy had nodded. ‘Chinese,’ he whispered. ‘I’m Chinese.‘”

“Bryon, you’re an honest kid in most ways, but you lie like a dog. Take Mark—I wouldn’t trust him around anything that wasn’t nailed down, but I’d believe anything he said. I’d trust you with my wife, if I had one. I trust your actions, but I double-check most of your statements.”

“Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.”