Quotes About Concealment

Margherita's father always said a person only truly revealed themselves when in disguise.

when he had looked into the heart of the labyrinth and made a vow to protect the secret with his life.

Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites

By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining.

and die, die without anyone ever knowing.

Silence was like dirt, good dirt. You could dig into it. You could bury stuff in it. She could bury the longing for her mother in this silence.

But she'd seen beyond his indifferent mask. She'd realized he was hiding his pain - she understood, because she hid her own. Not behind sullen ennui but by trying to stay quiet, unnoticed. Invisible.

It's the ones who don't tell you they are informing," he said, "that you have to worry about.

What a disgrace! They were afraid...ashamed...they chose to conceal it...they buried the roots of a Great Civilization...they lacked the courage to go further...and turned their backs on what science had to offer them...and tried to seal away forever the hole they had torn open with their own hands.

Given that, it turned out to be unnervingly easy to keep my friends and family at psychological bay: "To be sure," wrote Hugo Wolf, "I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.

As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling.

It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different.

I have no idea how I managed to pass as normal in school, except that other people are generally caught up in their own lives and seldom notice despair in others if those despairing make an effort to disguise the pain.

It's hard not to jump out instead of waiting to be found. It's hard to be alone so long and then hear someone come around. It's like some form of skin's developed in the air that, rather than have torn, you tear. Hide and Seek

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.

Yet are you so certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?

The smart kids think I have no shape. But I do. I'm just keeping it hidden. Because who wants them to see?

Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that—little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time—like somehow we were letting the side down.

We are imprisoned by the truth we dare not see. We are imprisoned by the questions we dare not ask.

I pushed open the folding door and stepped out. "What are you doing here?" Sam spun. Her eyes narrowed when she saw me. "What am I doing here? I'm not the one hiding in--" Her gaze lifted over my shoulder. "Daniel?" She looked from me to him. I realized I was in a notorious make-out spot with Daniel.

It was far from an ideal hiding spot. The crawl space wasn't even three feet deep. Dirt floor. I didn't want to think about what else was alive--or dead--down here.

The face, the whole body, the way you moved in it, just a guise. You put it on, you put it off again. What was underneath belonged to you, just you, as long as you kept it hidden.

Her chest feels very tight, as if she's suddenly full of poison. You have to keep it all inside. Like throwing yourself on a bomb to save everyone else. Except you're the bomb.