Truth is stranger than fiction.
This proverb means that reality can be more unusual or unexpected than anything we could imagine.
Sometimes the facts can be harder to believe than fiction.
The first recorded use of this expression in its modern form is in Lord Byron's Don Juan (1823):
'Tis strange -- but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
How oft would vice and virtue places change!
The new world would be nothing to the old,
If some Columbus of the moral seas
Would show mankind their souls' antipodes.
- George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron), Don Juan, Canto the Fourteenth, Verse 101
In fiction, we thrive on structure, on predictable narratives. The boy gets the girl. The villain falls. Good triumphs over evil. It's a familiar road, a road that we've cruised a thousand times, and we crave that familiarity because it gives us comfort. That's the cushy La-Z-Boy recliner of fiction. It's safe. It's predictable.
But reality? Reality is an untamed beast. It thrashes and bucks, cares nothing for comfort, for predictability. It gives us plane crashes, terrorist attacks, global pandemics, and star-crossed lovers dying before their time. Reality gives us brilliance and love and unspeakable horror, often all at once.
It's a circus where elephants balance on beach balls and the lion tamer gets bitten. It's a casino where the house always wins until a blind man hits the jackpot on his first go. It's a kid dreaming of being an astronaut and then becoming a famous writer instead. It's finding your soulmate at a funeral.
It's in this messy, illogical chaos that we find the odd, the unbelievable, the truly strange. Because unlike fiction, which is birthed from the confines of our imaginations, truth comes from a place that is boundless and chaotic and undeniably, unapologetically stranger.
