A quick one from a letter she wrote in 1958 to friend and playwright Maryat Lee, which can be found on pg 283 of The Habit of Being:
“This thing of demanding honesty of people is in the upper reaches of extreme Innocence. The only people of whom you can demand honesty are those you pay to get it from. When you ask [someone] to be honest with you, you are asking him to act like God, whom he is not, but whom he makes some attempt to be like in giving you what you want, and it doesn’t make him show up too well, of course. Never, above all things, ask your family to be honest with you. This is putting a strain on the human frame it can’t bear. [A person’s] honesty is only honesty, not truth, and it can’t be of much value to you intellectually or otherwise. To love people you have to ignore a good deal of what they say while they are being honest, because you are not living in the Garden of Eden any longer. The last thing I find I want of my kinfolks is their honesty. Oeeewarrrrhggghhh.”
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If one wants to see gracious Christian conviction hand in hand with a keen sense of irony, and a total lack of pietistic religiosity, read The Habit of Being. The woman understood grace, and not in a contrived deus ex machina, eucharistic symbol to the rescue way, either. She also understood that in a fallen world, grace and mutually understood hypocrisy are sometimes, if not all the time, strange bedfellows.