Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings.

George Eliot (1819-1880)

Elusive truth. (Don´t believe anything you are told, and only believe half of what you see).

Dexterity is either a highly-trained skill or gift of God and cannot be acquired by itself. Besides immediate feelings, emotions very treacherous by its nature and almost impossible to catch (sometimes best is to lose some pounds). Good rapper know how difficult it is.

In Adam Bede, Eliot explains she intends to depict people as they really are ("the exact truth"), but recognizes she will not be entirely successful despite her "best efforts" because the same "marvellous facility" which enables her to write about her "immediate feelings" also distorts them (renders them somewhat "false") by exaggerating their finer qualities. Eliot's remarks caution her readers about what to expect, and amount to an artistic confession.

"So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth."

Getting at "the truth" on the page is further complicated by the inadequacy of language: "It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium."