Fact Or Fiction Quotes

What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for your own life, do you ever really exist at all? ~ Maria Goodin

Books can be viewed as food for the mind

Stop reading and your brain can become anemic

Read junk and your thinking can become malnourished

But handle your diet with books well and your life long learning never stops ~ Jonathan Frakes

People want movies to be one thing or another; they want it be fact or fiction. ~ Laurel Nakadate

There is no fact or fiction, reality or illusion, there is only the trick of perception. ~ Debasish Mridha

What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh - and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us. ~ Richard Dawkins

Some have characterized the boomers as optimistic, but to my view they were simply soft and rather unprepared. They didn't know how to cook or sew or balance their own checkbooks. They were bad at opening the mail. They got headaches while trying to lead Girl Scout meetings, and they sat down in folding chairs with their fingers pinching the bridges of their noses, trying not to cry over how boring and hard life had turned out to be, as around them feverish little girls screamed with laughter over the fact that one of them had stepped in poop.. ~ Rufi Thorpe

Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good. ~ Randy Alcorn

Everybody says: the Kremlin, the Kremlin. They all go on about it, but I've never seen it. The number of times (thousands) I've been drunk or hung over, traipsing round Moscow, north-south, east-west, end to end, straight through or any old way - and I've never once seen the Kremlin.

For instance, yesterday - yesterday I didn't see it again, though I was buzzing round that area the whole evening and it's not as if I was particularly drunk. I mean, as soon as I came out onto Savyelov Station, I had a glass of Zubrovka for starters, since I know from experience that as an early-morning tipple, nobody's so far dreamed up anything better.

Anyway, a glass of Zubrovka. Then after that - on Kalyaev Street - another glass, only not Zubrovka this time, but coriander vodka. A friend of mine used to say coriander had a dehumanizing effect on a person, i.e, it refreshes your parts but it weakens your spirit. For some reason or other it had the opposite effect on me, i.e., my spirit was refreshed, while my parts all went to hell. But I do agree it's dehumanizing, so that's why I topped it up with two glasses of Zhiguli beer, plus some egg-nog straight from the bottle, in the middle of Kalyaev Street.

Of course, you're saying: come on, Venya, get on with it - what did you have next? And I couldn't say for sure. I remember - I remember quite distinctly in fact - I had two glasses of Hunter's vodka, on Chekhov Street. But I couldn't have made it across th ~ Venedikt Erofeev

Christianity, as a product of the resentment of the botched and the weak, has put in ban all that is beautiful, strong, proud, and powerful, in fact all the qualities resulting from strength, and that, in consequence, all forces which tend to promote or elevate life have been seriously undermined. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Celerity: noun, mass noun; an ability possessed by certain Que Cum Virtute Judicium (Virts) increasing the mobility or swiftness of movement ~ Alex Lane

When our society lost this communal network, many aspects of our culture died, including the fact that we lost contact with older family members who could give us perspective on our lives. Without that perspective, we've become overscheduled, hyperstimulated, and culturally grumpy. We are so burdened by the pace of our lives that when we must interact with older people who cannot keep up, we run out of patience trying to fit them into our schedules. We have forgotten - or never learned - how to value our senior adults' advice. As they begin to slow down, we push them aside so they don't impede our progress. While we may accomplish a lot every day, we don't necessarily feel good about our achievements because no one is there to tell us about the longer-term implications of choices we make. Many of us assume some things about senior adults that aren't true, and then can't understand why we aren't getting along better with this aging population. ~ David Solie

It was a wild indulgent slope we had cascaded down, and I didn't care. For once in my life, I didn't care about tomorrow. I didn't care if I starved or died. I feasted on the now, and I didn't let myself think about who he was or who I was, only who we were right now in this moment and how he made me feel on this patch of earth, in this patch of shade. In this strange upside-down world, ignoring tomorrow seemed as natural and expected as breathing. ~ Mary E. Pearson

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?

A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don't limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You'd be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.

Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You'll never have fun being someone you're not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.

Also, don't be afraid to fail, and don't be afraid to walk away. Writing isn't for everyone, and that's totally fine. One doesn't need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction. ~ T.E. Grau

the regional governments can't raise taxes. The source of revenue would simply leave for another region. In fact, the effect of decentralization without guaranteed funding and national or multinational standards is a competition between regions for the lowest possible tax rates.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy) ~ John Ralston Saul

The absurd view that other communities, religions, races, cultures, states and nations, are somehow "less than" one's own comes from an underdeveloped consciousness and low self-esteem. Prejudice and supremacism reveal that people do not possess a balanced framework of compassionate independence and self respect. We do not belong to any national construct, or group thought-form, but in fact belong to our great and beautiful world, and to the entire universe, as free and unique conscious beings. Prejudice comes from insecurity and its spiritually infantile need of belonging. Out of the hobbled spirit of attachment, and the insecure need of belonging, come the gross judgments against those who do not belong. ~ Bryant McGill

A person's affinity towards his or her own religious beliefs, has the same neurological qualities as of his or her emotional affinity towards the romantic partner. In fact the symptoms that follow the early euphoric phase of romantic love are often seen in religious people when their beloved religious faith is challenged. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying. ~ Christopher Moore

It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues. ~ Michael Tanner

Now they all felt the need to relieve themselves, especially the poor boy who could not hold it in any longer, in fact, however reluctant we might be to admit it, these distasteful realities of life also have to be considered, when the bowels function normally, anyone can have ideas, debate, for example, whether there exists a direct relationship between the eyes and feelings, or whether the sense of responsibility if the natural consequence of clear vision, but when we are in great distress and plagued by pain and anguish that is when the animal side of our nature becomes most apparent. ~ Jose Saramago

This is much worse than losing a cat. You do not wish the cat dead, for example, after the first two days. You still love the cat and presumably the cat still loves you, or some variation of love that may in fact be dependence and even indifference. ~ Suzanne Finnamore

The traditional arts and crafts are, in fact, "mysteries," with "secrets" that are not merely "tricks of the trade" of economic value (like the so-much-abused European "patents"), but pertain to the worldwide and immemorial symbolism of the techniques, all of which are analogies or imitations of the creative nature in operation ~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is. ~ Maggie Nelson

You may not be able to predict the time of a tornado, earthquake or the Lord's return. But you can know for a fact that He is coming back. Work today to share the escape route of God's grace with others, before the night cometh. ~ David Jeremiah

Faith and repentance are the same; they are not two separate decisions. One cannot trust Christ as Savior without repenting or changing his mind. The very fact that he trusts Christ for salvation shows that he has changed his mind regarding sin, salvation, and God. ~ Curtis Hutson

We must seek to understand the intent of communication without prejudging or rejecting the content ... Communication, after all, is not so much a matter of intellect as it is of trust and acceptance of others, of their ideas and feelings, acceptance of the fact that they're different, and that from their point of view, they are right. ~ Stephen Covey

Job moans that it is wanton cruelty that suffering people, brutalized or in mourning, should have to relive their horrors in dreams. In fact, why should any of us, in seeking rest, be met with nightmares? ~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? ... No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique. ~ Niklas Luhmann

He had a toughness about him, and his five grand Savile Row suit did little to hide the fact that he worked out regularly. He looked like someone who could've gone either way, the mob or something legitimate, and somehow ended up in the middle as a lawyer. ~ Dave Zeltserman

Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. In short, every idea is reduced to a relativity of some sort, whether psychological, historical, or social; but the assertion nullifies itself by the fact that it too presents itself as a psychological, historical, or social relativity. The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility. ~ Frithjof Schuon

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.
("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.

There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters. ~ Julia Glass

In fact, we often prefer predictable, obvious suffering to suffering that may or may not happen at any given time. And ~ Kelly G. Wilson

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display. ~ Oscar Wilde

Any individual decisions can be badly thought through, and yet be successful, or exceedingly well thought through, but be unsuccessful, because the recognized possibility of failure in fact occurs. But over time, more thoughtful decision-making will lead to better overall results, and more thoughtful decision-making can be encouraged by evaluating decisions on how well they were made rather than on outcome. ~ Robert Rubin

If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive? My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable. Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature, however conscious some, as against others, may become of the fictive quality of these fictions.

It seems to follow that we shall learn more concerning the sense-making paradigms, relative to time, from experimental psychologists than from scientists or philosophers, and more from St. Augustine than from Kant or Einstein because St. Augustine studies time as the soul's necessary self-extension before and after the critical moment upon which he reflects. We shall learn more from Piaget, from studies of such disorders as déjà vu, eidetic imagery, the Korsakoff syndrome, than from the learned investigators of time's arrow, or, on the other hand, from the mythic archetypes.

Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only when it is organized. It can be shown by experiment that subjects who listen to rhythmic structures such as tick-tock, repeated identically, 'can reproduce the intervals within the structure accurately, but they cannot grasp s ~ Frank Kermode

The wooden devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn't even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

If we keep punishing people for what their parents or their ancestors have done, the world as a whole can never move forward. Society will never grow. ~ Jennifer Wilson

Hitler, to Bertrand de Jouvenel, February 1936:

People have said that I owe my success to the fact that I have created a mystique… or more simply that I have been lucky. Well, I will tell you what has carried me to where I am. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people did not comprehend them. In these conditions they preferred to leave it to the professional politicians to get them out of this confused mess. I, on the other hand, simplified the problems. I reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realized this and they have followed me. Thus the class struggle, this famous class struggle! It is an absurdity, the class struggle, and I denounced the absurdity, and the people understood me! I made an appeal to reason. It was heard by the German people! ~ Adolf Hitler

Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact. ~ Agatha Christie

On the train on the way home, as I dissect all the ways that today went wrong, I'm surprised by the fact that I don't feel as awful as I might. Thinking about it, I know why that is: I didn't have a drink last night, and I have no desire to have one now. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction. ~ Paula Hawkins

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories ... ~ Geoff Dyer

How often do you ignore a dream, dismiss it as fantasy and then see echoes of the dream around you the following day? What if a dream were the forewarning of what will become your reality; if you are being told within the world of a dream what may occur in the near or distant future, but your mind mangles the truth and information so much that you discard it as fiction? ~ Samantha Robertson

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things. ~ Richard Lewontin

And as she watches, she discovers that a dream creates a nonexistent intimacy, that one feels, all the next day after the dream, as though certain words have been said or actions taken which have not. So that the object of the dream feels familiar, when, in fact, no familiarity exists at all. ~ Anita Shreve

Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories. ~ Orson Scott Card

It always comes back to the fact that it is best to listen to that inner voice, whether you're in a relationship or not. ~ Echo Bodine

I'm a compulsive note-taker, and I used to feel self-conscious about pulling out my little notebook and taking notes during a casual conversation. Then I noticed that people really seemed to enjoy it; the fact that I was taking notes made their remarks seem particularly insightful or valuable. Now I don't hold myself back. ~ Gretchen Rubin

Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by Willa Cather circa 1920. ~ Willa Cather

The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time. ~ Sam Harris

A lot of dyslexic kids are actually more intelligent than average and are very good, because they've got very good memories, at disguising the fact that they can't read or have got problems in reading and literacy. ~ Jackie French

She'd never forgotten their last night in Seoul, or above it in fact, surveying the city lights from atop Namsan Mountain. ~ Giacomo Lee

Dead at twenty. To die here on a strange planet I'd never seen and without any friends or family. Except for an alien named Garran. ~ Kalli Lanford