“To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach.”

Sermon (1899)

1990s, Memoirs (1995)

Source: The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9

Original: Il tempo rivela sempre la verità sugli eventi accaduti: il vero processo della storia e in modo accurato, molto accurato l'anima ed il cuore di ogni persona.
Source: prevale.net

Prologue.
Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954)

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

The Uttarpara Address (1909)

Letter to Elizabeth Otis, expressing dissatisfaction with L'Affaire Lettuceburg — a satire he abandoned in favor of work on what became The Grapes of Wrath (c. mid-May 1938) as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch, p. 38
Context: You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can't be printed. It is bad because it isn't honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but — I'm not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can't do satire. I've written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. … My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can't do better I have slipped badly. And that I won't admit — yet.