Quotes About Secrecy

Between them an image is projected: a single, winking cursor. It wants a code. It wants the code.

I cannot find a faithful message-bearer, he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.

Katherine Mansfield, clearly speaking personally, had remarked wryly in 1924 that "the true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone—reading between the lines—has become the secret friend of their author,"54

who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all.

How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

Even knowing all, being forbidden to tell. Even wanting to help, rescue is impossible. I know of no condition more painful than that.

The guy who isn't in the know can't understand ... how hard it is to be in the know and still not say.

You'd have to say his bad point was not having any bad points. Don't tell him I said so.

Within, there were several ponderous brazen-bound volumes of medieval date, a thin manuscript of yellowing parchment, and two portraits whose faces had been turned to the wall, as if it were unlawful for even the darkness of the sealed closet to behold them.

My skull was a face that concealed scorpions.

it is now clear to me that behind a façade of amiable bumbling, you are extremely well informed about your fellow spies. In fact, I suspect you know more about them than the ships you're supposed to be spying on.

I tenenti dei marine non venivano quasi mai messi al corrente delle informazioni riservate. Avevano il dovere di farsi ammazzare, ma non il diritto di conoscerne il motivo.

What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?

Plenty of boys had talked of the secret graveyard before, but as it had ever been with Nickel, no one believed them until someone else said it.

The boys knew to hide their enthusiasm over little kid things that still had an allure.

no one can resist what they can't detect".

moving down the stairs. "What's our best guess?" he whispered. There was some discussion on

Ben Freidman was lying to her, but in the hall of mirrors that was her life, she wasn't about to reveal what she really knew.

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.

To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now...

Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest's holes, or in the cupboard behind his mother's bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and smelt horribly of starling's dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in another, and on his knee a roll of paper.

For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame.