“When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn’t.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“Pride is a funny thing; it can make what is truly worthless appear to be a treasure.”  
—Alice Hoffman

“But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator’s credo that one doesn’t so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.”  
—Lionel Shriver

(This is why I just tell people the truth, regardless of how blunt, or plead the fifth.  Both are less work than lying.)

“A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.”  
—The Thirteenth Tale

“The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him.”  

—The Thirteenth Tale

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”
― The Thirteenth Tale