Life & Wisdom Quote by Ellis Peters

Peters frames truth less as a virtue than as a bill that inevitably comes due. The line’s quiet power is its refusal to romanticize honesty: truth is "costly", a word that drags the idea out of the chapel and into the marketplace. You can pay in reputation, comfort, relationships, even safety. Yet the sentence doesn’t claim truth is painless or noble; it claims it’s a good purchase. That’s a distinctly novelist’s move: morality rendered as practical economics, with stakes you can feel in your gut.

The subtext is a rebuke to the cheap, tempting alternative: the lie that buys temporary peace. Peters implies that deception is not free - it just hides the invoice until interest accumulates. In that light, truth isn’t idealism; it’s risk management. "In the end" matters, too. It concedes that truth can lose in the short run, that the honest person can be punished while the convenient story thrives. Peters is betting on narrative time: plots, like societies, eventually have to reconcile with what actually happened.

Contextually, this fits an author best known for the Brother Cadfael mysteries, where the crime is rarely just the murder but the web of concealment around it. In detective fiction, revelation is both justice and disruption; it restores order by breaking someone’s carefully arranged life. Peters’s intent reads as an ethical defense of that disruption: pay the price now, because reality will collect later, and the final accounting is always worse when you’ve been cooking the books.