The unvarnished truth can give quite a shellacking.
From Taking Everything into Account, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The man who rents the yellow house spent the morning stripping a chair out on his driveway, and the smell of it carried all the way to my branch. Around noon his sister came by and told him, flatly and without raising her voice, that he had been unkind to their mother at Easter. He kept sanding. For years I thought honesty was a kind of gift you handed over, and that the wrapping was the only thing that could hurt anybody; the unvarnished truth can give quite a shellacking, and it was her plain voice, not a cruel one, that put him down in the chair he had been working on. He sat there a long while with the sandpaper still in his hand. I notice she stayed, which I did not expect, and I have not decided yet what to make of that.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- We have learned so much about how to make a better world, but not learned enough.
- The beginning of naming is the end of knowing.
- Call it what you will, it will be what it is.
- Life does not come with captions for a reason.
- History is a pendulum in the shape of a mallet.
- Pain has a long life but a short memory.