4 Quotes on Truth
“Truths and roses have thorns about them.”
For over 20 years I have been collecting sentences and passages from books, songs, lectures and films in my Quote Book. I started writing down the lines that made me sit up and take notice. Often things that made me look at life in a new, different way. Phrases that made me think.
I hadn’t actually looked at this exercise book for a while and recently I pulled it out of a cupboard and started re-reading. What startled me was that so many of the quotes I found in it were now just things I said to people without even realising where I had got them from - or they had become maxims I live by - or just witticisms I would come out with at dinner parties back in the before-time when such things still existed.
Basically, I realised that I had swallowed the quote book, rather like Manny in Black Books swallows the Little Book of Calm and it turns him into a walking cliché. I have written a personality for myself in these pages, borrowing the words of other writers.
The quotes I want to share with you today are all about truth, because this is at the heart of my quote book, and what it has done, and why it is important and also why and how we create - but we will get to that in a minute. First, four wise sayings about truth:
2.
“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it. ”
3.
“‘But it’s true,’ said Jane.
‘Of course it is, but it’s not true enough for grown-up people to believe it,’ said Anthea.”
4.
“don yoo tel dem troowth
dai dozn belief yoo”
5.
“Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages.”
Ultimately we are all looking for truth. The truth about life, the truth about love, about death, about our pain, about how we got here, about where to go next: the truth about who we are.
Overwhelmingly, the quotes above seem to suggest two things, though: (1) the truth hurts and (2) people don’t actually want to hear it. However, both Santayana and the Bible say that (3) the truth also sets you free. The road to freedom, it would seem, goes through pain. Facing up to things we don’t want to know, or the disappointment of people we love and trust not believing us or not taking us at our word. But it is necessary. We cannot move forward in the dark: we need to see where we are, where we have been and where we could be going.
The truth is uncomfortable – but essential.
It is our duty, as writers, to find what truth we can, like prospecting for gold, and when we have found it, to tell it. Because the books we read, the songs we listen to, the films we watch - consciously or subconsciously - become a lamp we use to light our way. So they’d better be good lamps. They had better shine truth onto our path.
So keep writing. Someone somewhere is copying a sentence you wrote into their quote book. And then using your wit to impress people at dinner parties.
“The truth shall make ye fret.”