#lie

Mr Lorry asks the witness questions: Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#dickens #humor #lie #witness #humor

Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife. ↗

— William Golding

#civilisation #equality #life-experience #lord-of-the-flies #men

A frequent exchange of text messages is not a relationship. It's not even a pen-pal. ↗

— Ethlie Ann Vare

#love-addiction #self-help #sex #sex-addiction #love

Gomst's mouth framed a 'no', but every other muscle in him said 'yes'. You'd think priests would be better liars, what with their jobs and all. ↗

— Mark Lawrence

#humour #liars #lie #priests #funny

but it's not safe and I can feel him slipping away, so I just get out one more sentence. "Stay with me." As the tendrils of sleep syrup pull me down, I hear him whisper a word back but I don't catch it. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#katniss #meaning #mocking-jay #peeta #spolier

Don't try to be useful. Try to be yourself: that is enough & that makes all the difference. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#self-belief #self-growth #self-growth

It's effortless to let go of self-absorbed people. It's challenging to let go of someone you care about and it's exceedingly difficult to let go of an ideal and a belief in someone because what exacerbates the disappointment of finding out they weren't who they presented themselves to be, is the betrayal of it. ↗

— Donna Lynn Hope

#letting-go #self-belief

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them. ↗

— Henry James

#self-belief

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#god-s-will #grief #self-awareness #torture #self-awareness

Your ability to shape your destiny is directly proportional to your belief that it is a matter of will and determination--however much or little that belief may be. ↗

— James A. Owen

#believe #believing-in-yourself #determination #determined #self-determination