secrets Quotes

“What happened down in the dungeons between you and Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally the whole school knows.”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

“It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness.”

“I’ll never tell about it,” he answered. “But I says to mother, ‘Mother,’ I says, ‘I got a secret to keep. It’s not a bad ‘un, tha’ knows that. It’s no worse than hidin’ where a bird’s nest is. Tha’ doesn’t mind it, does tha’?‘” Mary always wanted to hear about mother. “What did she say?” she asked, not at all afraid to hear. Dickon grinned sweet-temperedly. “It was just like her, what she said,” he answered. “She give my head a bit of a rub an’ laughed an’ she says, ‘Eh, lad, tha’ can have all th’ secrets tha’ likes. I’ve knowed thee twelve year’.‘”

“The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep.”

“Sand keeps secrets better than mud.”

“When someone refuses to tell me a certain piece of information, it only makes me that much more determined to find out the truth. I hate being ignorant. For me, a question unanswered is like a thorn in my side that pains me every time I move until I can pluck it out.”

“He’ll tell you, perhaps . . . if you’re willing to pay.”

“A veil of secrecy must be preserved.”

“Then he grunts, ‘I will call you by Whisper-Ma-Phone, for the secrets I tell are for your ears alone.‘”

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

“There’s always another secret.”

“What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?” “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret.”

How could she imagine that a man who could love with so much intensity as Percy Blakeney had loved her from the first—how could such a man be the brainless idiot he chose to appear? She, at least, ought to have known that he was wearing a mask, and having found that out, she should have torn it from his face, whenever they were alone together.

“Mary Poppins never told anybody anything. . . .”

“But someday you’ll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”

What the deuce does the fellow mean by getting trap-doors made without first consulting you? Trap-doors!

″‘Not this way, master!’ he pleaded. ‘There is another way. O yes indeed there is. Another way, darker, more difficult to find, more secret. But Sméagol knows it. Let Sméagol show you!‘”

“What of a love unspoken no one ever knows But this is a love that lasts and in secrecy it grows”

“The secret of a better and more successful life is to cast out those old, dead, unhealthy thoughts. Substitute for them new vital, dynamic faith thoughts. You can depend upon it—an inflow of new thought will remake you and your life.”

Never let anyone know what you are thinking.

“The greatest secret for eliminating the inferiority complex, which is another term for deep and profound self-doubt, is to fill your mind to overflowing with faith. Develop a tremendous faith in God and that will give you a humble yet soundly realistic faith in yourself.”

There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it.

“At the great judgment day, whispered the minister—and, strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of truth impelled him to answer the child so. Then, and there, before the judgment seat, thy mother, and thou, and I, must stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”

“for you will always gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love.”

“Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

“For if a room that exists under the governance, authority, and intent of others seems smaller than it is, then a room that exists in secret can, regardless of its dimensions, seem as vast as one cares to imagine.”

“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.”

“Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”

“His Grace has been a secret since he was a child, Kat. His mother knew he’d only be used as a tool, if the truth came out.”

“I’m sure I was a huge disappointment. I’m not pretty or smart or athletic. I’m just like them - an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies.”

″‘Maybe I should have offered some of my secret candy instead,’ Mrs. White sighed in a quiet tone, as if talking to herself. ‘Secret candy?’ Nate asked, instantly intrigued. ‘My goodness,’ Mrs. White said. ‘Forget I mentioned it. I never bring up my secret candy on a first meeting. Which will it be, eggnog or brownie?‘”

“I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled.”

“Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!”

“Families are as sick as their secrets. The secrets are what they are ashamed of. Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame.”

“I know sometimes you think you are moving through this world alone, unseen, unnoticed. But don’t believe that for a second. I have made a study of you. I know what you are going to do before you do it. I know where you’ve been and I know where you’re going. For this anniversary, I’ve arranged a trip: Follow your beloved river, up up up!”

“I often don’t say this out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.”

“Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.”

“Here is the secret of Jesus’ life and work for God: He prayerfully waited for His Father’s instructions and for the strength to follow them. Jesus had no divinely-drawn blueprint; He discerned the Father’s will day by day in a life of prayer.”

“When you are next to the earth, you can hear her secrets.”

“When the critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did not - that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you had not yet shown, something that once revealed would make him doubt himself, make him falter just when it counted the most. Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about knowing your own heart.”

“But there was a Germany the boys could not see, a Germany that was hidden from them, either by design or by time. It wasn’t just that the signs - ‘Für Juden verboten,’ ‘Juden sind hier unerwünscht’ - had been removed, or that the Gypsies had been rounded up and taken away, or that the vicious Stürmer newspaper had been withdrawn from the racks in the tobacco shops in Kopenick. There were larger, darker, more enveloping secrets all around them.”

“Terabithia was their secret, which was a good thing, for how could Jess have ever explained it to an outsider? Just walking down the hill toward the woods made something warm and liquid steal through his body.”

“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”

“‘Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.’”

″ This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway.”

“Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”

“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. ”

“The light was too bad now for Shasta to see much of the cat except that it was very big and very solemn. It looked as if it might have lived for long, long years among the Tombs, alone. It’s eyes made you think it knew secrets it would not tell.”

″‘Don’t you talk to me that way,’ he says. ‘Don’t you question me. You don’t know anything about my life’.”

“I saw the old woman who had delivered me from my mother’s womb. I knew she held the secret of my destiny.”

“He had come here with the intention of embarrassing a snide assassin, and had instead found a young woman pouring her secrets into a pianoforte.”

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. ”

“I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this- places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.”

“And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it – oh so gently!”

“This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”

“The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”

“In my arms is a woman who has given me a Skywatcher’s Cloud Chart, a woman who knows all my secrets, a woman who knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I’m on, and yet she allows me to hold her anyway. ”

″ Franny literally jumped ... ‘What book?’ she said. ‘This, you mean?’

“Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other’s character and moods without attempting to pry into each other’s history.”

“We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”

“Prepare a crossing party,” snapped Horyse. “A single person to cross. Miss Abhorsen, here. And Sergeant, if you or Private Rahise so much as talk in your sleep about what you may have heard here, then you’ll be on gravedigging fatigues for the rest of your lives!”

“The king, however, had a lion which was a wondrous animal, for he knew all concealed and secret things.”

“Secrets tear you apart.”

“Say it again, angel. I beg of you.”

“Now you’re looking for the secret... but you wont find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”

“Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”

“The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret... but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know.”

“All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.”

“You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.”

“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.”

“I’ve always wanted her hair, though I’d never tell her that. Where hers is like fire, my hair is what we call river brown. Dark at the root, pale at the ends, as the color leeches from our hair with the stress of Stilts life. Most keep their hair short to hide their gray ends but I don’t. I like the reminder that even my hair knows life shouldn’t be this way.”

“Only Rahel noticed Sophie Mol’s secret cartwheel in her coffin.”

“I see thou wilt not trust the air With secrets.”

″So who were you? I saw your height and your hair, but I couldn’t see your face clearly enough. Still, you gave yourself up, Tyler. And for some reason, telling me you were nowhere made your eyes twitch and your forehead break into a sweat.”

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.”

“Why would you want to mail out a bunch of tapes blaming you in a suicide? You wouldn’t. But Hannah wants us, those of us on the list, to hear what she has to say. And we’ll do what she says if only to keep them away from the people not on the list.”

“Peregrine put out a hand and caught the hem of her skirt. Since it is almost impossible to continue walking up a staircase in a stately manner while someone is holding onto your dress, the Ordinary Princess stopped and said very haughtily indeed, ‘Will Your Majesty be so good as to release me.’ ‘Don’t show off!’ said Peregrine. ‘I can talk just like that too, if I want to. And I was going to tell you. I really was. That’s what I waited for. Only of course that flatfooted fathead of a Court Chamberlain had to go and spoil it all.’ ‘So you were a real prince—I mean king—all the time,’ said the Ordinary Princess.”

“If you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s always its own form of intoxicating buzz.”

“Presently he said, frowning more than ever, ‘So you were a real princess all the time. Amy, you are a little fibber! And for two pins,” said Peregrine, “I’d give you a good hard spanking!’ The Ordinary Princess stopped looking ashamed of herself and giggled instead. ‘You can’t spank a Royal Highness,’ she said.”

“Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.”

“American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”

“And there were so many boats. Isabel’s family had worked in secret all night with the Castillos, worried someone might hear them, but apparently, everybody else had been doing the same thing. There were inflatable rafts, Canoes with homemade outriggers. Rafts made of inner tubes tied together.”

“The secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.”

″ A man that can’t answer your questions when you ask, without getting defensive, is often a man who is keeping more than just the answer from you.”

“Aim at secret wishes that have been thwarted or repressed, stirring up uncontrollable emotions, clouding their powers of reason. Lead the seduced to a point of confusion in which they can no longer tell the difference between illusion and reality.”

“You have long known the secrets of my heart.”

“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”

“The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender.”

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

“We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

“And that was when I realized that somewhere in the last twenty-four hours a decision had been made: This was a secret. A secret with a capital S. A secret that we, as a family, would attempt to keep out of circulation for as long as we could.”

“Giving with strings of secret expectations attached is the greatest invitation to heartbreak.”

“He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.”

“The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive.”

“There are things that I canna tell you, at least not yet. And I’ll ask nothing of ye that ye canna give me. But what I would ask of ye—when you do tell me something, let it be the truth. And I’ll promise ye the same. We have nothing now between us, save—respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies. Do ye agree?”

“Hell’s Bells ringing, my secret music...”

“In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can’t be found on a shelf in the public library. But I didn’t know that then”

“I never lie,” I said offhand. “At least not to those I don’t love.”

″‘Where is my necklace?’ she asked. ‘What did you do with it?’ ‘I hid it in a safe place,’ Annemarie told her. ‘A very secret place where no one will ever find it. And I will keep it there for you until it is safe for you to wear it again.’

“This year I discovered something really strange. I discovered that my mother was sending a Christmas card to her parents in Ohio. I found out because I was looking through the pile of cards one day when I had a cold and stayed home from school. There it was—just like that. The envelope said Mr. and Mrs. Paul Hutchins, and that’s them. My grandparents! I didn’t mention anything about it to my mother. I had the feeling I wasn’t supposed to know.”

“This is the dystopian story of Toby Lolness,where his life is turned upside down,with the whole tree against him and his family for crimes they did not commit and a secret that could change the very tree forever.”

As the story unravels, you learn that Toby lives in the Tree but his family was forced out of the Upper Branches to the bleak Lower Branches because his dad was a scientist who refused to reveal a secret that could destroy the lives of them all.

“You can see why this would have been a dreadful thing for Jonathan to have to tell you. You never had the injections. That meant that while he stayed young, you would grow older, and older, and finally die. He loved you, and he could hardly stand that thought. Yet if it was distressing to him — he thought — how much more painful it would be to you! That is what he could not bring himself to tell you.”

This is the dystopian story of Toby Lolness,where his life is turned upside down,with the whole tree against him and his family for crimes they did not commit and a secret that could change the very tree forever.

One day her teacher asks her why she’s always late for school. Frightened, she reveals her secret. Her punishment: she must write 200 lines stating repeatedly, “There are no talking cats, and from now on I will arrive at school on time.”

“The memory was like a knife cutting into him. Slicing deep into him with hate. The Secret.”

“Depressed” is a word that often describes somebody who is feeling sad and gloomy, but in this case it describes a secret button, hidden in a crow statue, that is feeling just fine, thank you.”

“We’re all mad here, I am, you are. But I’ll tell you a secret... all the best people are.”

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

“This is the bear all lovely and clean who did not say just where he had been.”

“I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.”

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

“They became the closest possible friends. They told each other about their lives, their ambitions. They shared their deepest secrets with each other. The whale was very curious about life on land and was very sorry that he could never experience it. Amos was fascinated by the whale’s accounts of what went on deep under the sea.”

“Doctor De Soto stepped into the foxes mouth with a bucket of secret formula and proceeded to paint each tooth. He hummed as he worked. Mrs. De Soto stood by on the ladder, pointing out spots he had missed. He fox looked very happy.”

“The people who could fly kept their power, although they shed their wings. They kept their secret magic in the land of slavery.”

“Back home Miss Nelson took off her coat and hung it in the closet (right next to an ugly black dress). When it was time for bed she sang a little song. ‘I’ll never tell,’ she said to herself with a smile.”

″‘There was something funny about him,’ mused her father. ‘One of those- you know- not-to-be-talkedabout- things, and no one did talk about it, so I’ve never found out what it was. I don’t think Dove knew herself. Nothing disgraceful or catching: nothing you’d inherit... just mysterious.‘”

″‘You is deaf as a dumpling compared with me!’ cried the BFG. ‘You is hearing only thumping loud noises with those little earwigs of yours. But I am hearing all the secret whisperings of the world!‘”

“She carefully laid false trails until she herself sometimes could not find the way into her secret heart. Yet the older she grew the more she longed for someone to laugh at the false trails with, to share the secrets. ”

“Contemplation is nothing else but a secret, peaceful, and loving infusion of God, which, if admitted, will set the soul on fire with the Spirit of love.”

“But how do we live with these secrets locked within us? How do we tie our shoes, brush our hair, drink coffee, wash the dishes, and go to sleep, pretending everything is fine?”

“People talked about plenty of other stuff they weren’t supposed to, but only after a quick glance over their shoulder to make sure no one else was listening. Everybody did it so much there was even a special word for it: Deutscherblick. The ‘German Look.’ You did the German Look right before you said Germany might be losing the war, or complained about the food rations, or told a joke about Hitler. Because someone was always listening, always waiting to turn you in to the Nazi secret police. Always ready to rat you out to prove how loyal they were, even if they had said the very same thing yesterday.”

“The lake looked so still, so peaceful, with the last glow of sunset making pink reflections on its surface. But in a moment that was gone, the water suddenly looked very deep, very secret.”

″‘There’s three things I want to say to you, child.’ Mammy drew Julilly close again. ‘Pray to the good Lord. Remember to be proud that you had a strong, fine Daddy and a Mammy that loves you... This is secret talk I’m tellin’ you now. Hold it quiet in your head and never let it out of your mouth. There’s a place the slaves been whisperin’ around called Canada. The law don’t allow no slavery there.‘”

“Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me.”

“Drac the Warrior Queen and the crafty Gremlin leave the palace of the White Wizard for their secret jungle hideout...always on the alert for their next perilous mission.”

“Even so, the fear that now gripped him was a fear far greater than that of his own death. ‘I must pass on the secret.‘”

“I’m not going to give you the sketch outright. I’m going to leave it to you in my will. You won’t tell my secret because if you do, I’ll write you out of my will. You will lose all that money.”

“Calling like birds and animals wasn’t just a game they played. It was the way M.C. announced he was there without Ben’s daddy and his uncles finding out. M.C. wouldn’t have wanted to run into the Killburn men any more than he would want his own father to know he was playing with Ben.”

“Boys scattered around the hills never would play with Ben. They said it was because he was so little and nervous. But M.C. had played with Ben from the time he was a child and didn’t know better. When he was older, he had been told. Now he guessed Ben was like a bad habit he couldn’t break and had to keep secret.”

“There’s no secret fold within my feeling, no pleat where I force myself to stow a slip of paper that says ‘shame’ on one side and ‘weakness’ on another.”

″‘A good resistance fighter is lonely,’ he’d once heard his father say. ‘He’s alone with his tasks and his secrets.‘”

“He knew where some Jewish people were hiding. He was fairly certain who had an illegal wireless. He knew Dirk was a member of the secret underground forces. But Michiel kept all this dangerous information to himself.”

“A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.”

″‘Would you like to know a secret that no one else even suspects?’ Bisa Bea lives with me. No one knows about her. No one can see her.”

“Into the streets the Piper stepped, smiling first a little smile, as if he knew what magic slept in his still pipe all the while, for there his secret spells were kept. Then blowing soft, his lips he wrinkled, and green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled like candle flames where salt is sprinkled.”

“The Princess Alicia hurried up-stairs to tell a most particular secret to a most particularly confidential friend of hers, who was a Duchess. People did suppose her to be a doll; but she really was a Duchess, though nobody knew it except the Princess.”

“To become a master in the art of sales one must learn and practice the secret of each scroll. When one masters these principles one has the power to accumulate all the wealth he desires.”

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.”

“On reaching a small secret chamber in the left wing, he leaned up against a moonbeam to recover his breath, and began to try and realize his position. Never, in a brilliant and uninterrupted career of three hundred years, had he been so grossly insulted.”

“She saw her future ahead of her, bleak and unbearable and unavoidable. She dared not die, and yet she would hardly be alive, unable to marry, unable even to think about the subject herself, lest she discover the deadly secret and inadvertently let it slip; alone forever, burdened forever, guilty forever, yearning for death but forbidden to reach for it.”

“Keep your secrets Keep your silence It is a better gift than truth”

“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price.”

“Some secrets should never turn into confessions. I know that better than anyone.”

″ ‘But you mustn’t tell anybody your wish, or it won’t come true,’ cautioned her mother. ‘It’s supposed to be a secret wish.’ ”

“Look here, you’re a nice chap- I don’t mind your knowing. Don’t tell, but it’s all a pretend. This car doesn’t belong to me at all, and I don’t know how to drive it. They put me here just to make people look, and then they hope they’ll buy the car.”

“May the ground swallow me up, may old hags rattle my dry bones, and may I never more eat ice cream if I don’t guard this secret with my life.”

″‘And I found something that begins with C and ends with E!’ squeaked Sniff. ‘And somewhere in the middle there’s an A and a V- but I won’t say any more.‘”

″‘You saw them? You’ve seen them?’ She looked at me with astonishment and then drew me into her arms. ‘It’s the secret of Thackers.’

“That I should live to see the day when what concerns the welfare of the nephew and niece of my oldest friend should be kept from me!”

“As he went back toward the house, Jody knew one thing more sharply than he had ever known anything. He must never tell anyone about the rapier. It would be a dreadful thing to tell anyone about it, for it would destroy some fragile structure of truth. It was a truth that might be shattered by division.”

“I’m horribly late. What will they think of me? It was awful of me to come with you. I’m always doing awful things. That’s a secret between you and me.”

“The secret had been kept most carefully, and when, next morning, Saint Dominic’s woke up and swarmed down the passage past the Fifth Form class-room, the sight of a huge frame, with the words The Dominican staring out from it, and several yards of writing underneath, fairly startled them.”

“You may be sure there are mummies there, and very likely magic writings in their hands. I wish we could get a magic writing. Then we could do anything, and we could know all the secrets.”

“Some have quirkier quirks and deeper secrets than others, but all of them, including one’s own parents, have two or three private habits hidden up their sleeves that would probably make you gasp if you knew about them.”

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

“I don’t know how it has come to this. But I do know that it started with him coming here. Moving into the third floor. Benjamin Daniels. He destroyed everything.”

“It’s a beautiful building, but there’s something rotten at its heart. Now he’s discovered it he can smell the stench of it everywhere.”

“That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.”

Lot of funny people there were in the world—funny people with secrets.

“One should modulate the voice, my dear William, while breathing gently from the hips. Thus one avoids those chest-notes which have betrayed many a secret..”

“It’s what I was saying just now—a secret is a secret until you have discovered it, and as soon as you have discovered it, you wonder why everybody else isn’t discovering it, and how it could ever have been a secret at all.”

“Wild horses won’t drag the secret from me,” promised Anne solemnly. “How would wild horses drag a secret from a person anyhow?”

“They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime.”

“Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest an unspoken crime?”

“There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart.”

“The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed.”

“And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”

Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret!

Jo’s face was a study next day, for the secret rather weighed upon her, and she found it hard not to look mysterious and important. Meg observed it, but did not trouble herself to make inquiries, for she had learned that the best way to manage Jo was by the law of contraries, so she felt sure of being told everything if she did not ask.

“Don’t have any secrets, Jo. Tell it to Mother and keep out of trouble, as I should have done,” said Meg warningly.

“Stay,” said Monte Cristo, “here, in this very spot” (and he stamped upon the ground), “I had the earth dug up and fresh mould put in, to refresh these old trees; well, my man, digging, found a box, or rather, the iron-work of a box, in the midst of which was the skeleton of a newly born infant.”

“This child lives, and someone knows it lives—someone is in possession of our secret; and since Monte Cristo speaks before us of a child disinterred, when that child could not be found, it is he who is in possession of our secret.”

She could not keep her past a secret—girls had tried it, and they were always found out.

“Nelly, will you keep a secret for me?” she pursued, kneeling down by me, and lifting her winsome eyes to my face with that sort of look which turns off bad temper, even when one has all the right in the world to indulge it.

“I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he is the benefactor so long unknown to me.”

“Harry,” said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

He never knew that Sid lay nightly watching, and frequently slipped the bandage free and then leaned on his elbow listening a good while at a time, and afterward slipped the bandage back to its place again.

“Talk? Well, it’ís just Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter all the time. It keeps me in a sweat, constant, so’s I want to hide som’ers.”