Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The truth, huh? No one wants to hear the truth. The truth is never sexy. But you... You are too goddamned sexy to be real. -Christian to Lissa

Generally, a lot of the things people think are made up are real, a lot of the things people think are real are made up, a lot of the things people think are spontaneous are cleverly faked, and a lot of the things people think are fake are spontaneous.

You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to buy it.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be.

Only love is real...everything else is illusion

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

More often than not, things and people are as they appear.

The moment the light went out, everyone stopped pretending.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

Real’ is a dirty word in this place.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

If they [the dead] should speak, it would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realise, deep down, that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they seem to be-and never can be.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

Appearance versus reality? Appearance is reality, God damn it!