Quotes About Concealment

My mistress used to say that you couldn't ever really be naked unless you wanted to be. She said, 'Even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's quite difficult to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn't being naked, not really. It's just showing skin. And foxes and bears have skin, too, so I shan't be ashamed if they're not.

We have a content problem. They think we have no inner resources. But while I may look impassive, I am frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.

Shame squats over my face and sits.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

others to cover the signs of our

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.

The most certain way to hide from others the limits of our knowledge is not to go beyond them

Le moyen le plus sûr de cacher aux autres les limites de son savoir est de ne jamais les dépasser.

In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they may be set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion means a problem to the moral mind.

He knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech.

There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets.

Prior to the arrival of both the president and prime minister, listening devices and directional microphones had been concealed in the principal rooms of both the Villa Vorontsov and the Livadia Palace. Members of the British Military Mission in Moscow—all too familiar with eavesdropping—recommended discussing sensitive issues in the bathrooms, with the taps gushing water to drown out their conversations.

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.

I often don't say things 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.

When you are keeping a secret from someone, and that person dies, the secret becomes impossible to dislodge from inside you.

Even in a city as small as Ferrara, you can manage, if you like, to disappear for years and years, one from another, living side by side like the dead

Non-being is "not to be spoken of," for it is, in the strictest sense, nowhere.

Aveva urlato. E aveva sbagliato a farlo. Il disprezzo che provava per quell'uomo non doveva essere manifestato con un ruggito. Doveva essere espresso con il sibilo del serpente. E serpente divenne.

No one will ever know it and a sin that's hidden is half forgiven.

Il dolore è ancor più dolore se tace.

Ironies were like secrets: unshared they died.

You ok?" he said. No, I'm not. I'm lonely and exhausted and no kind of mother and on top of all that migrained with fucking idiotic desire. "I'm fine," I said, and opened the passenger door.

Snowden had been clear from our first conversation about his rationale for distrusting the establishment media with his story, repeatedly referring to the New York Times's concealment of NSA eavesdropping. He had come to believe that the paper's concealment of that information may very well have changed the outcome of the 2004 election. "Hiding that story changed history," he said.