Quotes about secrets

The old man … said … the notion that men can be understood was probably an illusion.

He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realised that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.

And what they don’t want you to know, you definitely want to know.

Not everything that’s unexplained is caused by magic.

This sort of thing is pretty common—people often draw more attention to themselves trying to hide their activities than whatever it was they were up to would. Plus sometimes the cover-up is more illegal than the thing they were covering up. Still, if people were brighter routine police work would be much harder.

Keeping a secret always makes the police suspicious. And while we’re willing to believe in the possibility of a totally innocent explanation, we never think that’s the way to bet.

Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.

Nothing contains a greater metaphysical mystery than the fact that a single thing presents two separate sides if you change the direction of your eyes, that a single phenomenon has a hidden "secret side." A long time ago, when I was a child, I would look at a framed painting hanging on the wall and become obsessed with the thought: What kind of world is secretly hidden behind that framed landscape? I often removed the oil painting to peer at its back. This question I had as a child remains for me, an adult today, as an unsolvable mystery.

I'd begun to grasp the principle that the less anybody knows, the less any squealer can give away. And it was easy to see that in a place where questioning was liable to assume the aspect of a blood-sport, the less one did know about other people's business, the better.

I suppose we all have a number of carefully furnished, non-communicating rooms in our minds.

Secrets have power over us. Only when secrets are revealed can truth be known and freedom brought about.

He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish.