How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.

It is hard, what I have told you, I know, and I will be condemned for being so hard in my phrasing, but I cannot tell you anything else, for it is the truth! Why should I deny it?

"Honesty," Machigi drawled in his thickest Marid accent, "is a truly frightening power. He has it. Do you dare, Giti-sa? Do you dare deal with a man who will not lie to you? He will tell the truth to you, and he will tell it to me, and to Lord Bregani and to the aiji-dowager. So get your story straight and be very honest in that list-making. You would not want to leave something out that could come back to haunt you."

But because of his telling, many who did not believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story, out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living - to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better than one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all. (vi)

Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?

I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.

It is hateful to me to tell a story over again, when it has been well told.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, must be the truth?

The story she had told me was possible, but it was not believable.

That which is absurd and impossible, that which in any other history would be called falsehood, deception, outrage and cruelty, cannot be made reasonable, righteous, and true by the added words: "Thus saith the Lord."

I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and [illegible] liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

You tell a man the truth about himself and, well, they find they have trouble accepting it.

But the christian story of God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it, (for that is the plain language of the story,) cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him that it was done to make mankind happier and better, is making the story still worse; as if mankind could be improved by the example of murder; and to tell him that all this is a mystery, is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it.