"A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths"
About this Quote
Tsvetaeva doesn’t defend lying so much as she indicts a certain kind of “truth” for being spiritually cheap. “Low truths” are the facts that flatten experience into accounting: the petty diagnosis, the social verdict, the pragmatic warning that arrives dressed as wisdom. Against that, she offers “a deception that elevates us” - not a con meant to steal, but a chosen illusion that lifts the inner life into motion. In a poet’s mouth, deception is close to art: the made thing that isn’t literally true yet somehow tells on us more accurately than reportage.
The line is also a wager about dignity. Tsvetaeva wrote through revolution, exile, scarcity, and the brutal narrowing of possibility that Soviet reality imposed on imagination. In that atmosphere, “truth” often meant the state’s truth, or the bleak truth of survival, both of which demanded submission. Her phrasing turns aspiration into a moral category: elevation becomes its own justification, as if the soul has claims the ledger can’t satisfy.
Subtext: she’s warning you that facts alone don’t organize a life; stories do. The “host” of truths suggests a crowd - noisy, insistent, socially enforced. One “deception” is singular, intimate, even beloved (“dearer”), the private myth you keep because it gives you a self you can stand to inhabit. The provocation is that she’s willing to risk being fooled if the alternative is being diminished. That’s romantic, yes, but it’s also a hard-earned survival strategy from someone who knew how quickly reality can become a cage.
The line is also a wager about dignity. Tsvetaeva wrote through revolution, exile, scarcity, and the brutal narrowing of possibility that Soviet reality imposed on imagination. In that atmosphere, “truth” often meant the state’s truth, or the bleak truth of survival, both of which demanded submission. Her phrasing turns aspiration into a moral category: elevation becomes its own justification, as if the soul has claims the ledger can’t satisfy.
Subtext: she’s warning you that facts alone don’t organize a life; stories do. The “host” of truths suggests a crowd - noisy, insistent, socially enforced. One “deception” is singular, intimate, even beloved (“dearer”), the private myth you keep because it gives you a self you can stand to inhabit. The provocation is that she’s willing to risk being fooled if the alternative is being diminished. That’s romantic, yes, but it’s also a hard-earned survival strategy from someone who knew how quickly reality can become a cage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
More Quotes by Marina
Add to List
