Wit & Attitude Quote by Marguerite Yourcenar

There is something almost austere - and deliberately provocative - in claiming you have never had to sweeten truth with falsehood. Yourcenar isn’t just announcing a personal ethic; she’s staking out a literary stance against the cozy fraud of “useful” lies, the kind that make hard realities palatable to readers, to regimes, to friends, to oneself. The sentence is built like a refusal: truth is not a pill to be hidden in jam. If it can’t be swallowed as-is, that discomfort is part of its meaning.

The metaphor does sly work. “Seasoned” and “sauce” evoke the kitchen, domestic ease, the social rituals where tact is often just dishonesty with good manners. By choosing food language, she targets the everyday compromises that blur into character. “Digest it more easily” hints that lies aren’t only told by speakers but demanded by audiences. We often want our truths pre-chewed: simplified, flattering, narratively coherent. Yourcenar denies that bargain.

As a novelist - especially one drawn to historical consciousness and moral interiority - she’s also pushing back on the suspicion that fiction itself is deception. The subtext is: invention is not the same as lying. You can write imagined lives without corrupting the underlying moral record. Coming from a 20th-century European mind shaped by propaganda, war, and ideological storytelling, the line reads like an anti-totalitarian reflex: when public language is routinely “sauced,” refusing embellishment becomes a form of resistance, and style becomes a kind of witness.