.. 'You can't read everything. I've never got beyond the beginning of Proust. I love him, but I can't seem to get beyond about page three.' They were comfortable in each other's company, and this confession seemed to accentuate the ease of their relationship. The confession itself was not entirely true; Isabel had read more Proust than that, but other people undoubtedly found it reassuring to think that one had only read a few pages. Certainly those who claimed to have read Proust in his entirety got scant sympathy from others. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read? Some politicians, she reminded herself, did that--or the equivalent--when they claimed to be down-to-earth, no-nonsense types, just like the voters, when all the time they were secretly delighting in Proust . . Alexander McCall Smith
Some Similar Quotes
  1. To find out if she really loved me, I hooked her up to a lie detector. And just as I suspected, my machine was broken.
 - Unknown

  2. I never lie, " I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love. - Anne Rice

  3. ...maybe it's only fitting that relationship that started with a lie would end with one. - Ally Carter

  4. If you say that you never lie in life, you honestly insult my intelligence. - Toba Beta

  5. Mr Lorry asks the witness questions: Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord. - Charles Dickens

More Quotes By Alexander McCall Smith
  1. Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use...

  2. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought...

  3. Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said...

  4. There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

  5. She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position. Although she still believed that one should...

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