
“Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 10.
“Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 10.
“The imagination is an eye where images remain forever.”
“To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth.”
How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)
Context: Literature... seeks to entertain — and why is this?... The reason, fundamentally, is that literature knows something that science does not: the human resistance to hearing the truth. Science does not inform scientists of this basic fact.... The wisdom of literature arises mainly from its attention to this point. To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth.
“It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.”
Source: The Collected Stories
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.
“The truth displayed in a good life is the fairest of images.”
Reverend Sigurður
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden
"The Statesman's Manual" (1816)
“Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.”
Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir