Metaphorically True / Literature

• Common in Christian novels such as Left Behind, where the Moral Guardians and The Fundamentalist are the target audience, and lying, even to the minions of Satan and/or to save lives, is forbidden by God, and woe to any book with a protagonist or "hero" who lies. But God only has a problem with complete lies. Deliberately deceiving someone is fine, as long the liar can explain to himself why the statement is technically true. Suffice it to say that there's plenty of debate over when/if it's always wrong to lie, especially considering that the verse often quoted as "Thou shalt not lie" actually says "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor", which is a lot more ambiguous.
• Brenish lives here in Below, and especially loves lies of omission. He repeatedly questions the authenticity of the treasure map he knows is fake, even well after it's fooled both Gareth and the Expert and the quest is underway. Whenever he finds a cache of items, he leaves something out but gives up the rest. (In one case, he says that the item he pocketed could have been destroyed and its pieces lost among the floor debris.) His trade offer to Lila, while sincere and a fair deal, is embellished to stratospheric heights: "The late spellbinder Dexter the Unctuous, a man of wide renown, bestowed upon me two talismans of great power." The lofty-sounding but insulting title is one the man would not have chosen for himself, but others would; his truly wide renown was for being a slimeball; the meanings of "talismans" and "great power" are stretched paper-thin; the binder didn't make them; and Brenish got them from his corpse. He's also saying this to a mind reader.
• In the Black Widowers story "Truth to Tell", a man who is suspected of stealing money and bonds from his company denies his culpability several times using the same phrase: "I did not take the cash or the bonds." He swears he is telling the truth. The club's incomparable waiter Henry solves the case by asking "Did you, by any chance, take the cash and the bonds?" The man doesn't answer, but he doesn't have to.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • In every Percy Jackson and the Olympians novel, there is a prophecy for the quests the heroes undergo. All of them have double meanings, leading the heroes to believe one thing, but then for the plot to turn out completely differently, but in hindsight, still true to the prophecy, just in an entirely different way.
  • In The Heroes of Olympus, Mars pretends to have never met Percy by using this trope. Technically it was the Greek war god Ares that met Percy, not the Roman war god Mars ... even though they are the same person. Sorta.
• Chrestomanci: Christopher from The Lives of Christopher Chant is very fond of these, and his friend the Goddess isn't above half-truths either.
• Agatha Christie liked to use this trope in her works. The most famous example might be And Then There Were None, which features ten individuals who have all had a hand in killing someone. Technically speaking, they're not guilty of actual murder — they didn't shoot or poison their victims — but their actions did lead to their eventual deaths, which leads a mysterious murderer to administer a twisted form of law on them:
  • Anthony Marston, a young, carefree, attractive man, ran over two children in his car. He's the only member of the group who actually directly killed an individual, though he did so unknowingly; the murderer kills him first because Marston himself isn't haunted by guilt, and the killer wants the victims to squirm.
  • Thomas and Ethel Rogers were the caretakers of an elderly woman and just so happened to be out of the house one night when she badly needed medicine; she died because they didn't reach her in time.
  • General MacArthur discovered that his wife was having an affair with a soldier under his command; he sent the young man on a suicide mission, knowing there was virtually no chance of his surviving.
  • Emily Brent, a strictly Christian woman, kicked her young maid Beatrice out of the house when she discovered that the girl had become pregnant; the desperate Beatrice drowned herself.
  • Justice Wargrave sentenced a man to death without getting as full a picture of the evidence as possible.
  • Dr. Armstrong operated on a patient while drunk, knowing full well that he wasn't able to perform surgery properly but doing so anyway.
  • Blore, a police officer, gave false testimony in exchange for a promotion; the innocent man he sent to prison died not long after being incarcerated.
  • Philip Lombard abandoned a tribe of natives he was traveling with while working in Africa; like Marston, he admits his culpability, but he technically didn't kill anyone.
  • Vera Claythorne, originally a governess to the half-brother of the man she loved, allowed the child to swim out to a rock in the ocean, knowing full well that he wasn't strong enough to resist the undertow.
  • The real tenth death turns out to be Isaac Morris, an Amoral Attorney who was used by the killer to make the necessary arrangements for the murder plot. Morris introduced a young woman to drugs, which led to addiction and eventual suicide.
  • Additionally, the killer follows an Ironic Nursery Tune in the methods they use to off the others, but some of their methods only very loosely correspond to the poem's lines: for example, to fulfill the "a bumblebee stung one" line, they used a cyanide-filled syringe to "sting" someone to death.
• In Vivian Vande Velde's The Conjurer Princess, the morally questionable wizard whose talent is seeing the future tells one of the adventurers that if they go on a quest, he had better be prepared to die. Said character walks out of the party but later returns for a Big Damn Heroes moment — and is captured, put on his knees in front of an executioner... and ducks away at the last second. Prepared to die, indeed. Extra half-truth bonus points because it was the other adventurer who died on the quest.
• In a novel by Albert E Cowdrey, a megalomaniacal criminal wants revenge on the human race for his imprisonment. Before he's allowed out of prison, he's asked a few questions, and there's a machine that can tell whether he's telling the truth or not. When asked if he regrets his behavior, he says yes (meaning he regrets that his mistakes got him caught). When asked if he wants to harm anyone or something like that, he says "I do not wish to harm any human individual."
• Mr. Chen from Dark Heavens is a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. When asked the source of his wealth, he prefers to reply that he does some martial arts training and various circumstances for the government, as well as some fieldwork before his daughter is born. If he's asked whether he means the Hong Kong or continental Chinese government, he says "above either", generally taken to mean he's with the UN. Inevitably, people assume he's a spy, and to that question, he says he can't discuss it. In fact, he's a god in the Celestial Bureaucracy and being, amongst other things, the god of martial arts, he spends a lot of time teaching it to other gods.
• In Destroyermen: Distant Thunders, several Lemurian marines take their traitorous former king ashore. When they return, the marine in charge of the group swears to Jim Ellis that they left the king all their spears and provisions, claiming that he should survive for some time. He also swears that the king will not die by their hands. What he omits is that the spears were used to pin the king's arms and legs to a tree, and his belly was sliced to allow his entrails to be pulled out and hung on the branches to attract predators. The food was also left for this purpose. To be fair, the king deserved this.
• Discworld:
  • In Small Gods, Vorbis explains to Brutha that the claim that the Omnian priest sent to convert the Ephebians was killed by these ungodly savages represents a "deeper truth". According to Vorbis, this is much truer than the mundane truth, that the Ephebians listened, threw vegetables, then sent him away, and he was killed by the Quisition as an excuse to start a holy war. Of course, Vorbis is a practitioner of Double Think, so this trope is nothing to him.
  • In A Hat Full of Sky, "never lie, but don't always tell the truth" is among the pieces of advice Miss Tick gives Tiffany.
  • Monstrous Regiment: "Upon my oath, I am not a dishonest/violent man." Kind of hard to be a violent or dishonest man when you're actually a woman.
  • Thief of Time: "No monk here knows deja-fu! I'd soon hear about it if they did." This is true. None of the Time Monks know how to use time itself as a weapon in martial arts. The smiling old man who's always sweeping in odd corners, however, is not a Time Monk...
  • Carrot does this surprisingly frequently when negotiating with hostile characters. However, he has never (as far as anyone can prove) told a direct lie. In fact, he has a tendency to use the truth as a weapon. Both he and Angua have told someone impeding their progress that unless the person stands down, they'll be forced to carry out the orders they were given regarding resistance and that they'll regret it terribly if they do, but they won't have any choice. In the circumstances, an implied threat is very clear — Shame If Something Happened. However, the orders on both occasions were "leave the offending party alone, and see if you can find a workaround in this morass." The people they're sort-of threatening never notice.
    Sergeant Colon was lost in admiration. He'd seen people bluff on a bad hand, but he'd never seen anyone bluff with no cards.
  • The witches at the end of Wyrd Sisters are quite clear in their own minds that they've told everyone the truth; Tomjon and the Fool are half-brothers, and Verence is the older. If people want to assume that Verence is therefore the illegitimate son of the King and Mrs Fool, and entitled to claim the throne if Tomjon doesn't want it, rather than Tomjon being the illegitimate son of the elder Fool and the Queen, that's their problem.
  • "If the Hogfather does not return, then the sun will not rise tomorrow." No, instead a sphere of burning gas would. Although while Susan thinks this trope is in effect Death reveals that something much worse would happen.
  • Vimes uses this in Feet of Clay when some arsenic is planted in his desk along with whiskey to frame him as a poisoner; he has the presence of mind to pour out the whiskey instead of drinking it, give the arsenic to the Watch alchemist, and swap it for some sugar when he does the Fingertip Drug Analysis in front of Lord Downey, then say that it's a dangerous substance in an I Never Said It Was Poison gambit. When it's revealed to be sugar, Lord Downey yells "You said it was dangerous!" Vimes says "Right. Eat too much of it and see what it does to your teeth!"
• One damned soul in The Divine Comedy asks Dante if he will clear the ice from his eyes after he tells his story. Dante responds that if he doesn't, may he "go to the bottom of the ice". As it turns out, the entrance to Purgatory is reached by traveling below the ice...
• In the Dragaera series, Anti-Hero Vlad Taltos is a mob boss required to testify "under the orb" (that is, under magical lie detection) when a neighboring boss disappears. Among other applications of this trope, Vlad tells the prosecutors, "As far as I'm concerned, he committed suicide." Treating Vlad the way he did, he brought his murder on himself.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Faeries cannot lie. Dresden notes, and tells one to its face, that the fact that they can't lie in no way has hampered their ability to deceive. In fact the inability to lie means most of them are very skilled at being subtly misleading.
  • Colin Murphy has a field day with this trope in Ghost Story, luring Dresden into doing a job for him by claiming that three of his close friends and associates will die if he doesn't, and they are in great danger. It turns out that all mortals tend to die sooner or later, no matter what wizards do (and his friends with their Chronic Hero Syndrome are in danger anyway), and that Murphy's boss (who is an Archangel and can extinguish galaxies with an errant thought) is less than pleased at being drawn into the deception by proxy, though he's also somewhat reluctantly impressed.
• In Dune, Baron Harkonnen suborned the Suk doctor Yueh by taking his wife, Wanna, hostage, and torturing her. If Yueh betrayed Duke Leto, the Baron promised him that "I'd free her from the agony and permit you to join her." Subverted in that, as the Baron reveals that he's already killed Wanna and has Yueh killed as well, the doctor tells him "You think I did not know what I bought for my Wanna." Yueh had already taken the opportunity to implant a poison gas pellet in Leto's tooth and instructed Leto to use it to assassinate the Baron. The Baron survives, but his Mentat isn't so lucky.
• In the Flashman novel Royal Flash, Flashman swears that he will let a mook who has tried to kill him go, if he tells him what he wants to know. The mook tells and Flashman lets him go ... over a cliff and into a chasm. He said he would let him go!
• Forgotten Realms:
  • In The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, the Orc King Obould Many-Arrows convinces his race's patron god Gruumsh, Chaotic Evil god of destruction and slaughter, to make him into a Chosen by promising he will use that divine power to lead orcs to a position of unparalleled power and respect. Gruumsh eagerly complies... only to find out afterward that Obould is a Visionary Villain. That position of unparalleled power and respect is real, but it's not the all-conquering horde that Gruumsh had envisioned; it's founding the first-ever legitimate orc kingdom, forcing the other races to respect orcs as having their own sovereign rights, rather than being vermin to burn out whenever they grow too annoying.
  • In The Knights of Samular by Elaine Cunningham, Renwick Caradoon used such tricks to twist the Abyss out of his contract with an incubus lord and — after this bright idea went bad anyway and he needed help — fool already suspicious Blackstaff (which may be more impressive).
    "A prideful wizard, a summoning went awry," Renwick said, genuine sorrow and regret painting his tones. "But before her death, my niece gave me the means to banish the demon."
    Khelben gave him a searching look, and Renwick felt the subtle tug of truth-test magic. It slid off him easily; few spells recognized a lie fashioned by placing two truths next to each other. Let Khelben think Nimra was the prideful wizard who had summoned the demon.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Goblet of Fire, Mad-Eye Moody declares that "If there's one thing I hate more than any other, it's a Death Eater who walked free." Moody is essentially the wizard equivalent of a Nazi Hunter, so the reasonable assumption to make from this is that he's angry they didn't face justice for their crimes. Near the end of the book, it's revealed that Moody is an imposter, having been replaced by a Death Eater himself. However, the Death Eater in question, Barty Crouch Jr., was entirely truthful when he said this: he meant that he hated free Death Eaters because most-if-not-all of the free Death Eaters became such by lying about their crimes, pretending to have been brainwashed, or selling out their fellows. Crouch, as a fanatical believer in the cause, believes that the real Death Eaters were the ones who either endured prison or went down swinging, and those who escaped the courts and the reaper were cowardly, opportunistic scum.
  • Dumbledore throughout the series. In Order of the Phoenix, this is justified since he fears that Voldemort may be able to listen in on Harry's thoughts.
  • Sirius Black has his moment as well. When he finally gets a chance to talk to Harry in Prisoner of Azkaban, instead of telling him straight away that he's innocent, he says he killed Harry's parents, for no other reason than that he feels guilty for their deaths. Actually, all he did was insist on making Peter the Secret-Keeper. This backfires.
  • Lord Voldemort tells Harry that his Muggle father abandoned his witch mother because he found out she was magical. While this is technically true, Voldemort neglects to mention (or is unaware of the fact) that the only reason his father was attracted to his mother was that she used a love potion to brainwash into marrying her and rape him. He ran off after she stopped drugging him with it in hopes that he would actually fall in love with her or at least stay for the child.
• The Inheritance Cycle has the elves, who, as Brom says, are masters of saying one thing but meaning another. They are able to do this because speaking in the ancient language prohibits one from lying, though they can still say something that they believe to be true. Eragon uses this technique at one point in an attempt to conceal his actual feelings regarding Arya.
• The Irregular at Magic High School:
  • Tatsuya does not consider himself part of the Yotsuba clan. He's directly descended from them (in a society where Superpowerful Genetics are very important), and he does a lot of work under duress for them, but emotionally he is disowned and very happy to be that way. So when Mayumi notices Tatsuya's strong magic and asks if he's from a clan, he answers convincingly that he isn't...and apparently believes it to be true himself.
  • Maya did not give birth to Tatsuya, but she considers herself his mother because he was born to fulfil her prayers for a child who could get revenge on the world (maybe) and their magics are similar. (It isn't an example of Family of Choice, either- she was complicit in abusing him and hasn't spoken to him in at least a decade.) This is because Maya is insane, as Tatsuya- of all people- lampshades.
• Journey to Chaos: After snatching his Spell Book away from his muggle apartment mate and needing a mundane explanation, Eric says, “After high school, I had the acting role of a mage in a mercantile company. My roommate sent me this when I lost it.” This sentence is absolutely true, but it implies that he went directly to this company after high school instead of years afterward and only joined at a high school age due to a Fountain of Youth effect, as well implying that it was an acting/theater company that had a mercantile attitude instead of being a literal mercenary company with a mercantile attitude.
• Schmendrick the Magician in The Last Unicorn. As the narrator puts it, he's not lying, just arranging events in a more logical way.
• In the Lensman stories, it is a vital plot point that humanity (and the other allied races of civilization) be Locked Out of the Loop, because of the consequences of realizing the truth. Even so, Mentor of Arisia goes to extraordinary lengths to keep Kim Kinnison from learning the truth without openly lying to him, right up to and including altering Kinnison's perception of what species Fossten is. Causing endless problems in fandom, as Smith admits to in his essay The Epic of Space.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • This comes up several times, mostly to do with how the Men of Rohan and Gondor have muddled ideas about Lothlórien and Fangorn from the fact that their legend describes them as "perilous" and "dangerous". As Gandalf explains, both those things are true, but that doesn't make them malevolent.
  • The Silmarillion contains a summary of the events of The Lord of the Rings at the end, and states that Frodo destroyed the One Ring. This is not exactly accurate, as the Ring is destroyed more or less by accident after Frodo succumbs to the Ring and fails to destroy it. That being said, Frodo still deserves credit for getting the Ring to the spot where it can be destroyed, and Word of God has stated that no one has enough willpower to willingly destroy the Ring regardless.
• In the Mageworld novel The Price of the Stars, the enigmatic old man that answered to 'Professor' pretty much lived on the trope. For example, when the Adept Llannatt Hyfid asked him if he knew the hidden asteroid base he operated out of was Magebuilt he responded "I did, Mistress. But that was long ago... five centuries and more," leaving those present who were not aware that he was himself a renegade Magelord and far older than he looked to draw their own conclusions.
• The Mahabharata:
  • Drona is convinced to lay down his weapons after hearing that his son, Ashwatama, is dead. Before doing so, he asks Yudhishtara, who notably cannot tell a lie, if this is true. Yudhishthira replies, "Yes, Ashwatama the elephant is dead" — with the keywords muttered under his breath. You see, the son was still alive, but the Pandavas had killed an elephant with the same name. Before the start of the battle, the Pandavas proposed a number of rules, on which both armies agreed, that would ensure that everyone fought honorably. About every single rule is broken within the first days of battle by the heroes of both sides.
  • In the Menon translation, Prince Bhima utilizes this trope when going undercover. Someone remarks suspiciously that Bhima doesn't look like a cook, and Bhima replies that he can cook many dishes. This is true, but there's a great difference between being able to cook and being a cook.
• Inverted in the Ann Leckie story "Marsh Gods". Physical Gods Cannot Tell a Lie, but one god can manipulate people into adopting a secret system of slang so that when it's put to a God Test by outsiders, it can fail by making putatively untrue statements like "I eat 'gravel' for breakfast!"
• Middle School Blues:
  • This young adult novel contains a lampshaded example of this trope. The set-up is this: Cindy's friend Jeff has run away from home, Cindy thinks she knows where he is, but she doesn't want to tell anyone because she doesn't want to raise his parents' hopes if she's wrong. She decides that she has to check it out for herself. Cindy goes to investigate, after telling her parents that another friend, Becca, asked Cindy to spend the day at her house. When she's caught, her parents accuse her of lying about going to Becca's house. Cindy insists that she didn't lie, she had been asked to spend the day at Becca's, and she never said that she was going there. Her parents are distinctly not amused by this, and explain that being deliberately misleading is no different from lying.
  • Cindy herself is on the receiving end of this when she goes back to school the next day to find the Alpha Bitch telling everyone that Cindy ran away to be with Jeff...
• In Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales, pixie Kaye invokes this to fulfill a quest to find a faerie who could lie, which is impossible. She succeeds by claiming SHE can lie. She can lie... on the ground.
• In Nineteen Eighty-Four the names of the Ministries (Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Love, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace) can be perfectly true from The Party's point of view, rather than ironic. Minitru doesn't falsify or lie, it corrects the past to show the new truth, which having been corrected has now always been the truth; Minipax maintains internal peace by continually waging external war; the goal of Miniluv is for everyone to love Big Brother and The Party via Happiness Is Mandatory; and Miniplenty is in control of Oceania's economy, which appears to actually be very strong but is directed almost solely towards creating weapons and large public gestures which do not actually improve the lives of the population but keep their minds occupied.
• The John Dickson Carr novel The Nine Wrong Answers has authorial footnotes that use this trope to an almost gleeful extent, to the point that the final one points out that at no time did previous footnotes technically lie about niceties like whether a man who was poisoned actually died, and whether a man really was who he was claiming he was. (Although some critics maintain that Carr slipped in a few places and really did make the "incorrect" claims.)
• In The Overstory, Olivia tries to sound more impressive to a boyfriend by saying that her father is a human rights lawyer (he is actually an intellectual property lawyer). Olivia notes that what she said is sort of true.
• In Pact, Padraic, an ancient Faerie, specializes in this due to not being able to lie, telling vague truths out of context when he cannot rely upon Exact Words.
  Padraic: An accomplished liar remembers his lies. I cannot, of course, lie, but I do tell half-truths, and a half-truth could be said to be half a lie.
  • Since practitioners lose their powers if they lie or break a promise, this is true of nearly every character in Pact. It's often weaponized, both to fool people, and by deliberately challenging what someone has said, sometimes leading to duels over bending the truth. For example, Duncan Behaim told Blake that he could keep him in the police station until midnight. Blake manages to leap out a window, thus making Duncan a liar... except that he'd bled quite a bit beforehand, so technically some of Blake was still inside the station.
  • Many practitioner societies keep one or more people on hand who never Awaken, purely so that they can lie to others.
• In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, Penny's mother is a Living Lie Detector with analysis abilities that make Sherlock Holmes look like a chump. When Penny's sneaks out for a supervillain showdown, her plan if caught sneaking out is to confess to being on a date with Ray in order to avoid being suspected of being a supervillain. Calling a multisided superpowered battle a "date" could be considered technically true, but stretches the definition beyond credibility.
• A character in Sherwood Smith's A Posse of Princesses defends himself with this after revealing a major deception, but the protagonist will have none of it:
  Rhis: He can explain all he wants about how everything he said was strictly true, but it only works if you know the real truth.
• The Principia Discordia either plays this straight or subverts it depending on your own point of view, in this exchange in an interview with Discordianism's founder, Malaclypse the Younger (Mal-2):
  Interviewer: Is Eris true?
  Mal-2: Everything is true.
  Interviewer: Even false things?
  Mal-2: Even false things are true.
  Interviewer: How can that be?
  Mal-2: I don't know man, I didn't do it.
• In The Legend of Luke from the Redwall series, Vilu Daskar (evil pirate captain) promises to let some of the prisoners free if they tell him where treasure is, neglecting to mention that the last time he made this promise, he set them free by tying weights to them and throwing them overboard. Fortunately, the heroes don't fall for it, and the whole treasure story was just a plan to trick Vilu Daskar anyway.
• In The Riftwar Cycle novel Prince of the Blood, Nakor pulls this after being threatened with a death sentence for possessing a red-and-gold speckled falcon. Said falcon is the symbol of the royal family of the land of Kesh, nearly extinct and held with the same regard as a sacred cow. Nakor explains himself by claiming that he was the falcon's transport/bodyguard and he was merely aiding the bird's quest to visit the Empress on her birthday and repopulate the royal mews, which at that point had been reduced to three female falcons.
• Safehold: Merlin uses these quite a lot to maintain the Masquerade without actually lying (since he will need to tell everyone the truth eventually). For example, he frequently says that he lived in the Mountains of Light for many years, neglecting to mention that he was a robot powered down in a hidden cave under the mountains for that period. Another one is when introducing the concept of Arabic numerals, he says that they were taught to him by "a wise woman" (presumably Nimue's elementary school teacher).
• Scavenge the Stars: When Amaya asks her Evil Mentor Boon if he was responsible for killing her father Aran Chandra, Boon responds by stating that "he guess he did". It's revealed later that Boon is Aran and that he had metaphorically killed himself.
• In the backstory ofThe Scholomance, when Deepthi 'The Speaker of Mumbai' Sharma first laid eyes on her favorite great-grandson Arjun's quasi-posthumous daughter she had a screaming meltdown about untold death, the shattering of Enclaves, Dark Power, and so forth; to the point where if young Galadriel's mother Gwen Higgins had not fled back to the Hippie Commune in the Welsh back-country where she gave birth five years before Deepthi's grandson (Arjun's father) would have killed her (and himself). When confronted by El a dozen years later during the events of The Golden Enclaves, Deepthi confessed what she had actually foreseen was that in addition to reclaiming the Golden Sutras the girl would have a combination of raw casting power and particular affinity for death magic which would enable her to put down the undying all-devouring horrors known as Maw-Mouths; which by definition not only serves as a mass Mercy Kill to everyone those things have ever eaten but given how all the Enclave construction/expansion since the loss of the Golden Sutras required making one of those things killing them risks ripping part or all the foundation out from under a random Enclave. Why the theatrics? El Higgins was also prophesied from birth to counter the terrible long-term working of a powerful and well-connected maleficer which was in turn doomed to run out of control and destroy the world, and that maleficer was wise enough to start tracking down said counter for the sake of eliminating or subverting whatever it would turn out to be immediately. Unless El spent her childhood well off the proverbial grid and out of contact from the family of a world-renowned prophetess she would either die or become the great menace Deepthi convinced her family she was going to turn out as.
• Shannara:
  • The Druids are well known for only telling the heroes they recruit exactly as much as they think the heroes need to know and no more. Allanon, the Druid who started this tradition, justified it with the fact that his father gave a full briefing about the Sword of Shannara to Jerle Shannara, who then failed to properly wield it to defeat the Warlock Lord. The incomplete briefing he gave to Shea 500 years later allowed Shea to win.
  • Also done in the second book of the series, Elfstones of Shannara, in a very sympathetic way. The dying King Eventine Elessidil asks his son about Amberle, his beloved granddaughter, who he has learned has just returned from her quest with Wil Ohmsford to prevent The End of the World as We Know It. His son hesitates, then tells his father, "She's safe. Resting." While this isn't exactly a lie, she's actually been turned into a tree. The old king, relieved, is able to die peacefully.
• In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling tells Dr. Hannibal Lecter that her father was a marshal. Later on, when she is recounting to him how the man died, Lecter catches enough clues to easily deduce that the man had actually been a night watchman. Starling's defense is that the official job description had read "night marshal".
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In the Republic Commando Series, Walon Vau exploits this trope to lie convincingly to a Jedi, telling him that Kal Skirata was not working for "the enemy"... but referring to a different enemy than the one the Jedi was asking about.
  • Deliberately played with in Shatterpoint; Mace keeps coming up with crazy plans, and is generally direct and honest with everyone. The standardized response to his plans is "Are you crazy?" However, it turns out that the mysterious tape his former apprentice and daughter-figure sent him pretending to be going mad and/or at risk of joining the Dark Side was deliberately intended to lure him to the planet. Ironically, she does actually fall.
  • At one point in New Jedi Order, Wedge Antilles employs this to scare away some Obstructive Bureaucrats, saying that Rogue Squadron has spotted a Yuuzhan Vong fighter in orbit, possibly a scout, and the planet will be a war zone soon. After the meeting, Rogue Leader Gavin Darklighter is confused because he hasn't heard any of this, and Wedge replies that the Rogues did spot a ship (several hours ago and it was just a shattered husk from an earlier battle), that type of fighter is often used as a scout, and the Vong will be coming sooner or later.
    Gavin: Sir, how you can be so deceptive without actually lying is beyond me.
  • In her first scene in the same series, Vergere is asked if she's ever seen a Jedi before. She replies, entirely honestly, that she has. The Yuuzhan Vong don't think to inquire any further, like asking where. Vergere has seen Jedi before because she used to be one.
• The Twilight Saga author Stephenie Meyer (in)famously claimed that vampires are unable to reproduce. When Bella later got knocked up, she went back and used weasel words to try and claim she actually meant that only female vampires can't have kids all along (evidently by claiming an obscure definition of "have").
• The Underland Chronicles: In Gregor and the Code of Claw, the Prophecy of Time is fulfilled when Gregor breaks his sword and refuses to fight in another war, fulfilling the verse stating that the warrior would be killed. In this case, the trope is used to hint that hint that the prophecies are mundane, and that people are just interpreting events to fit them.
• In The War Gods, Lady Leeana asks her mother for permission to go riding. The mother wants to make sure that Leeana is planning on taking her guards along, and Leeana assures her mother that she knows that she won't be able to go riding unless her bodyguard goes riding too. She's planning to run away from home, and she knows that unless she gets rid of her bodyguard by sending him out riding on a long errand, he'll try to stop her.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Fireheart and Graystripe are caught coming back onto ThunderClan territory after sneaking away to check on RiverClan (who are suffering because the river is flooded). When asked to explain themselves, they claim that they wanted to see how far the floods went, which was true, but not the whole truth.
  • The Ultimate Guide, which was written by an author particularly sympathetic to Ashfur, omits his betrayal and attempted murder of Firestar (attempting to frame Brambleclaw in the process) by saying that he "was not a friend of Firestar".
• In The Wheel of Time the Aes Sedai tried to get people to trust them by swearing an unbreakable oath to "Speak no word that is not true." It prevents them from directly lying, but because they think they have Omniscient Morality License, they become Literal Genies prone to False Reassurance. People have long grown weary of their games and warn each other, "The truth they speak may not be the truth you think you hear." At least one character notes that their honesty oath has ultimately given them a reputation for dishonesty. However, when an Aes Sedai speaks very plainly, you can usually depend on it being the truth, at least as far as she understands it.
• In The Will of the Empress, when Briar Moss is asked how he managed to locate his foster sister, his answer is "I forgot. I have a terrible memory for secrets I don't wish to tell."

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