Quotes About Concealment

They mustn't know my despair, I can't let them see the wounds which they have caused.

Can you tell me why people go to such lengths to hide their real selves? Or why I always behave differently when I'm in the company of others? Why do people have such little trust in one another? I know there must be a reason, but sometimes I think it's horrible that you can't confide in anyone, not even those closest to you.

But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem. I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I'm free, and yet I can't let it show.

He said life would have been much easier if he'd been a Christian or could become one after the war. I asked if he wanted to be baptized, but that wasn't what he meant either. He said he'd never be able to feel like a Christian, but that after the war he'd make sure nobody would know he was Jewish.

Can you tell me why people go to such lengths to hide their real selves? Or why I always behave very differently when I'm in the company of others? Why do people have so little trust in one another? I know there must be a reason, but sometimes I think it's horrible that you can't ever confide in anyone, not even those closest to you.

I have the hardest time trying to maintain a normal facade when I'm feeling so wretched and sad. I have to talk, help around the house, sit with the others and, above all, act cheerful! Most of all I miss the outdoors and having a place where I can be alone for as long as I want!

The strangest things happen to you when you're in hiding!

I can't let them see my doubts, or the wounds they've inflicted on me. I couldn't bear their sympathy or their good-humored derision.

I wonder whether you can tell me why it is that people always try so hard to hide their real feelings?

I pour my heart out to you, and the rest of the time I'm as impudent, cheerful and self-confident as possible to avoid questions and keep from getting on my own nerves.

Fietsen, dansen, fluiten, de wereld in kijken, me jong voelen, weten dat ik vrij ben, daar snak ik naar en toch mag ik het niet laten zien, want denk er eens aan als we alle acht ons gingen beklagen of ontevreden gezichten zouden zetten, waar moet dat naartoe?

Honestly, you needn't think it's easy to be the badly brought up central figure of a hypocritical family in hiding.

People seem always actually to know, with a degree of pain that has required the comfort of fairy tales, that when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden.

The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped them maintain this image, because if anyone outside the family could see who they really were deep down, the whole system, the ship of your family, might sink. We held our breath to give the ship buoyancy. We were little air tanks.

Rosie had to keep her room neat enough so James would not freak out, but not so neat that they could figure it all out, break the code, of who you truly were, what you were up to, your values, your truest parts. ... you were layer upon layer of ideas and erasures and new ideas and soul and images. [p. 68]

tucked his hands under his thighs as if they had to be contained, as if they would lash out otherwise, or fly away.

Mankind has a history of forgetting the unpleasant, the undesirable. Bu ignoring its existence, it can make the source of past Terror disappear.

You cannot tell people to take into account what they do not wish to know.

chin and nose. He wore the cap tilted at such an angle that the lower half of his face was visible, and his gap-toothed smile was the first thing one saw of him.

An enormous gleaming grand piano stood in the center, its legs decently masked.

His face crumpled a little. It was highly expressive, mirroring his thoughts and feelings more than he wished.

What lurked beneath my fancy frills, behind my quiet unquestioning eyes? Who was I? Had I no remembrance of a warmer flame than that which gave its wintry glow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed within my quietly moving form~ The Vampire Armand

with no tribute whatsoever to the human habit of disguising the stare.

I couldn't bear delving into his soul without his knowing it. Yet I couldn't stop myself from sensing a vast secret terrain inside him, grimmer perhaps than I had ever dreamed, and his words came back to me that the darkness in him was like the darkness I'd seen at the inn, and that he tried to conceal it from me.