The Truth About Me

The truth is, I very often don’t tell the truth. Having been brought up to be polite and respectful at all times, it’s often tricky to say what’s really on my mind. Oddly enough, I was also brought up to tell the truth. I’m not too sure how my parents squared those two conflicting principles but they must have done a pretty good job because here I am, in my forties, passing along the same crazy rules of social etiquette to my children.

And so I tiptoe around the harsher truths at the forefront of my mind, probing its spongy depths for the socially acceptable truths; the truths that won’t offend others and the truths that won’t bounce back and hurt me. But oh…to be able to tell it like it really is! So here are some of my honest-to-goodness, really and truly, hand on heart thoughts, ramblings, likes, loves and hates. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re not.

Take ’em or leave ’em.

Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.  ~Antonio Porchia,
Voces, 1943,

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little
at a truth we find bitter.  ~Denis Diderot

The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.  ~Attributed
to James A. Garfield

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.  ~Mark Twain

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and
posthumously.  ~Thomas Sowell

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and
hurry off as if nothing had happened.  ~Winston Churchill