secrecy Quotes

“I understand that secrecy is part of, well, an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity. And when you deprive your friends . . . of experiences like I had, you’re basically stealing from them. You’re depriving them of something they have a right to.”

“But silence, do you hear me? Silence upon the whole subject; and let no one get before us in this design of discovering the center of the earth.”

“Silence creates its own violence.”

“It feels strange not to talk to my mom about something, someone, who’s becoming so important to me. My mom and I are drifting apart, but not because we’re spending less time together. And not because Olly’s replacing her. We’re drifting apart because for the first time in my life, I have a secret to keep.”

“He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think that he was perfectly indifferent.”

“It is the Ring Dance. It is said the crawlers perform it only in the greatest secrecy for ones they believe to be chosen.′ [...] ‘Chosen to give them time,’ said Vikus, as if that explained it all. Gregor translated that in his head to mean’chosen to give them life.‘”

“Since we weren’t married, we couldn’t kiss each other in public, or even give one another a friendly hug to express our extreme joy. We risked imprisonment and being whipped.”

“Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.”

″‘Can’t I see them?’ begged Mr. Alden. ‘I won’t tell them who I am.‘”

“Then a man asked, ‘What is your name, boy?’ Henry did not know what to say. He did not want to tell his name. So he answered, ‘Henry James.’ Now this was Henry’s name, but it was not all of his name.”

“We’d better hide our treasure before we reach the abbey. The abbot is sure to be curious about the contents of the bag and ill probably find his way inside it.”

“He’s a man of few words, and he doesn’t know what either of them means,” people said, but not when he was within hearing.”

“His arms become a set of parentheses bracketing the sweetest secret phrase.”

“And when he stays in Australia fifteen years, as Mr. Mark says, and as I know for myself for five years, he has his reasons. And a respectably brought-up girl doesn’t ask what reasons.”

“All I knew was that one didn’t ask questions about him.”

“What’s the safest place in which to hide anything very important?” “Somewhere where nobody will look.” “There’s a better place than that.” “What?” “Somewhere where everybody has already looked.”

He was facing the secret door; if it opened he would see it. At any moment now it might open. Bill dropped into a chair and thought. Antony must be warned. Obviously. But how? How did one signal to anybody? By code. Morse code. Did Antony know it? Did Bill know it himself, if it came to that? He had picked up a bit in the Army—not enough to send a message, of course. But a message was impossible, anyhow; Cayley would hear him tapping it out. It wouldn’t do to send more than a single letter. What letters did he know? And what letter would convey anything to Antony?.... He pulled at his pipe, his eyes wandering from Cayley at his desk to the Reverend Theodore Ussher in his shelf. What letter? C for Cayley.

“Yes, but you were so dashed mysterious about that. I asked you what the point of it was, and you wouldn’t say anything.”

For a long time, as it seemed to the watchers, he stood there, very big, very silent, in the moonlight. At last he seemed satisfied. Whatever his secret was, he had hidden it; and so with a gentle sigh, as unmistakable to Antony as if he had heard it, Cayley turned away and vanished again as quietly as he had come.

“Yet some men bury their secrets thus,”

“But he knew not that the eye and hand were mine!”

“But why does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?”

“There is a strange secrecy in his nature,” replied Hester, thoughtfully; “and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his revenge.

“I have only kept this secret so long from you,” continued Faria, “that I might test your character, and then surprise you.”

Monte Cristo turned to Haydée, and with an expression of countenance which commanded her to pay the most implicit attention to his words, he said in Greek, “Πατρὸς μὲν ἄτην μήζε τὸ ὄνομα προδότου καὶ προδοσίαν εἰπὲ ἡμῖν,“—that is, “Tell us the fate of your father; but neither the name of the traitor nor the treason.”

I suffered unspeakable trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last dissolve that spell of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For months afterwards, I every day settled the question finally in the negative, and reopened and reargued it next morning. The contention came, after all, to this;—the secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.

“I have found out who my patron is. It is not a fortunate discovery, and is not likely ever to enrich me in reputation, station, fortune, anything. There are reasons why I must say no more of that. It is not my secret, but another’s.”

“It’s a good rule never to leave documentary evidence if you can help it, because you don’t know when it may be put in.”

“Now, whether,” pursued Herbert, “he had used the child’s mother ill, or whether he had used the child’s mother well, Provis doesn’t say; but she had shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the child’s mother.”

“If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes to-night or to-morrow night at nine, and to come to the little sluice-house by the limekiln, you had better come. If you want information regarding your uncle Provis, you had much better come and tell no one, and lose no time. You must come alone. Bring this with you.”