Marquis de Custine Quotes

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

Art lies by its own artifice.

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight. Mercutio: And so did I. Romeo: Well, what was yours? Mercutio: That dreamers often lie. Romeo: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.

Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

Poets tell many lies.

And, of all lies (be that one poet's boast) / The lie that flatters I abhor the most.

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

I'm not real. I'm theatre.

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

Though dreams can be deceiving; like faces are to hearts, they serve for sweet relieving, when fantasy and reality lie too far apart.

Smoke You stand infront of me, pretending to be solid, but you are nothing more than smoke and mirors. You said you'd never leave, that you would care for us forever, but now you claim you cannot stay? That you've been called away. When you go, who will i turn to when it all crashes down? Tell me who. Then tell me, how I can believe anone again, if all your promises have been lies.

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, Yet Grace must still look so.

They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

Had he been willing to live a hypocrite, he would have been respectable, he at least could have died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death there would have been an imposing funeral, with miles of carriages, filled with hypocrites, and above his hypocritical dust there would have been a hypocritical monument covered with lies.

We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.

I know now that the mythic monster I created was largely a fiction.