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Exlpore more Truth quotes
"Macy: "In Truth, I said, "there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.Wes: "How do you win? he askedMacy: "That, I said, "is such a boy question."
"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
"A false potential can dress itself up as attractive ideas."
"Truth does not sit in a cave and hide like a lie. It wanders around proudly and roars loudly like a lion."
"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."
"Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are."
"When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else."
"The only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit."
Explore more quotes by John McGahern
"When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not."
"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other."
"When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody."
"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space."
"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."
"We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places."
"Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century."
"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."
"I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years."
"I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor."
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