“Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth.”

— Kenzaburō Ōe

Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
Context: Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.

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Kenzaburō Ōe43

Japanese author 1935

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 250 (2003)

“How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1954)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.

“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

"Life After Lebanon" (1984), later published in On Call : Political Essays (1985), and Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)

“But if you can't tell the truth to the people you care about the most, eventually you stop being able to tell the truth to yourself.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Variant: If you can't tell the truth to the people you care about the most, eventually you stop being able to tell the truth to yourself.
Source: City of Ashes