14 William Saroyan Quotes on Truth

William Saroyan quotes on truth

18. One of us is obviously mistaken.

21. Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: 'You just change your attitude now please, young man.' This transformation in kids - from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream - is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.

23. Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.

70. My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad.

85. Nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity.

110. 'Mrs. Sandoval,' Homer said swiftly, 'your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong.'

118. He knew the truth and was looking for something better.

121. I had three secrets and sold them all.

131. I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it.

145. Love of the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near I come to the truth.

150. The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art - that is, the meaningful-real.

166. Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?

168. I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene... the drama of life... the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free... the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on.

170. To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.