Confidences Quotes & Sayings

Their friendship, remembered from the battle school days, gradually disappeared. It was to each other that they became close; it was with each other that they exchanged confidences. — Orson Scott Card

Sometimes, loyalty gets in the way of what you want to do. Sometimes, it's not your secret to tell. — Stephenie Meyer

A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets. — Lauren Oliver

As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind, some weather-beaten, ragged old rooks' nests, burdening their higher branches, swung like wrecks upon a stormy sea. — Charles Dickens

Girls especially are fond of exchanging confidences with those whom they think they can trust; it is one of the most charming traits of a simple, earnest-hearted girlhood, and they are the happiest women who never lose it entirely. — Lucy Larcom

But all that talk. All those confidences. He shuddered to think about it. At the time, though, he didn't know any better, and he was filled the gleeful lurching and teeth-chattering panic of early and undiagnosed love. — Jennifer DuBois

Like sex, poverty and power, suicide may always be with us. But like them again, the actual form is takes is essentially time-specific and culture-bound, not only in the past but in the present too. The people who took their lives, the paths which led them to that end, and the experience of dying in this way were deeply influenced by specific historical circumstances. Only by making a greater effort at historical understanding can this most secret house of death be made to yield up more of its confidences. — David Cannadine

And what made these heart-to-hearts possible
you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time
was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions. — Kazuo Ishiguro

doomed to be the recipient of confidences... — Joseph Conrad

Secrets could never be rushed. They had to come of their own accord, on their own schedule. That way ,when they came , the offered themselves as a gift. — Donna Jo Napoli

Throughout my years of public service, I've listened to the voices of the gay and lesbian community, whether through whispered confidences or public declarations. I understand what it truly means to say that all people should be treated equally, and I'll always stand up for fair and equal treatment of gay and lesbian Americans. — Mark Udall

Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand. — Anne Roiphe

As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel. — Tiffany Madison

Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky. Somewhere — Gregory David Roberts

Doubtless a good general rule for close friendships, where confidences are freely exchanged, is that what one is not informed about, one may not inquire about. — Louis Kronenberger

Empty him of his confidence by highlighting his failures so that therefore his head will be far more easily swelled with adulations and self-confidences. — Anonymous

I am not in search of friends and confidences. I'm concentrating on being. I live each hour, one by one. My mind is quiet and still. I am no longer waiting for time to pass — Rose Tremain

He liked to think he was in on the secrets she had. When she smiled slyly, he smiled slyly too, and they exchanged confidences in whispers. The world had drawn close around them, and they were in the center of it, or rather Rose of Sharon was in the center of it with Connie making a small orbit about her. Everything they said was a kind of secret. — John Steinbeck

I'd learned more about her in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they're the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky. — Gregory David Roberts

The greatest part of intimate confidences proceed from a desire either to be pitied or admired. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile — F Scott Fitzgerald

When fear is the disease, faith and confidences are the medicine. — Debasish Mridha

Friends (at least good ones) like one another, enjoy one another's company, and maintain mutual goodwill. They help one another in times of need, listen to one another's problems, make sacrifices, and provide emotional support when necessary. They share confidences and can be trusted not to divulge important secrets. Their relationship is personal and private, and it does not answer to a higher authority. They engage in constructive conflict management, and they try to resolve differences among themselves. Friends should not go to court to resolve a dispute. Ideally, friends do not care what they get out of the relationship but value the friendship for its own sake. They are honest with one another, feel free to express themselves to one another, but do not pass judgment. Finally, unlike partners in kin or work relations, one can choose one's friends. — Daniel J. Hruschka

It was never a good idea to confide in people. They always remembered, and when they came up to you in the street, years later, you could see the information was still firmly attached to your face and present in the way they said your name and the pressure of their hand clasping yours. — Helen Simonson

Feeling a little foolish over her confidences, Elizabeth glanced up at him with an embarrassed smile. "What is the most beautiful place you've ever seen?"
Dragging his gaze from the beauty of the gardens, Ian looked down at the beauty beside him. "Any place," he said huskily, "where you are. — Judith McNaught

If you chance to fall into any kind of dispute with a friend, do not despise him for this reason, nor betray his confidences. Prov. — Unknown

Sitting outside on a dark night, under the stars, invites confidences amongst people of all ages, and all walks of life. It invokes an intimacy you don't find under most other circumstances. — A.B. Shepherd

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. — Sylvia Plath

I learned long ago that silence invites all manner of confidences. — Kate Morton

Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same, speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly out of place and yet so perfectly at home. — Charles Dickens

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did. — Jodi Picoult

I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip and confidences. No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart. — Gustave Flaubert

God has special confidences for each soul. Indeed, it would seem as though the deepest truths came only in moments of profound devotional silence and contemplation. — Charles Brent

They had studied law, information technology and art history as part of their beauty treatment, they had let Norwegian taxpayers finance years at university just so that they could end up as overqualified, stay-at-home playthings and sit here exchanging confidences about how to keep their sugar daddies suitably happy, suitably jealous and suitably on their toes. — Jo Nesbo

Fate knows all about you, it knows your fears and your weaknesses and your confidences and strengths, and it can be ready for all of them when it decides that the time is right. It can move you like a pawn in a terrible game of chess, sacrifice you for the good of others, drop you from a building you should never have been inside, give you a disease that no one has ever heard of. Luck and chance are impartial. Fate is active. It picks on people. Almost as if it thinks about things too much ... — Tim Lebbon

Ah, the truth, what a thing it is! I sacrifice so much for it, with people: I forego, for truth's sake, discretion, loyalty, diplomacy, tact, polite manners, elegance, grace, poise, balance, good taste, conformity, image-role, fashionableness, polish, confidences, promises, ambition, consistency, identity, clarity, comprehensibleness, good will, hypocrisy, and lots of other things
amass sacrifice, at truth's altar. God! is truth worth it? I hope it is. It better be, in fact. — Marvin L. Cohen

Mothers, are you so busy with social life, [with projects], with clubs, with working out of the home, or with housework, that you have not time to sit down and talk to your little girls and tell them the things they should know when they are nine, and ten, and eleven, and older? Can you be frank and loving to them so that they in turn can be frank in giving you their confidences? — Spencer W. Kimball

Marriage requires the giving and keeping of confidences, the sharing of thoughts and feelings, respect and understanding always, marriage requires humility - the humility to repent, the humility to forgive. Marriage requires flexibility (to give and take) and firmness: not to compromise principles. And a wise and moderate sense of humor. Both need to be pulling together in the same direction. — Richard L. Evans

Part of the early Who career was all about knocking people's confidences out. — Roger Daltrey

Unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or — F Scott Fitzgerald

We are bound by the secrets we share. — Zoe Heller

Time it was And what a time it was, it was A time of innocence A time of confidences Long ago it must be I have a photograph Preserve your memories They're all that's left you — Paul Simon

For there is no bond more lasting than that formed by
the mutual confidences of that magic time when youth is slipping from
the sheath of childhood and beginning to wonder what lies for it beyond
those misty hills that bound the golden road. — L.M. Montgomery

Mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently — F Scott Fitzgerald

She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors - Light. — E. M. Forster

The moment of cocoa-drinking was always the moment of confidences. — Stella Benson

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective. Sometimes I'd just like to mace them. I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness. And I want to throttle them for blindly handing over the world to us like so much skid-marked underwear. — Douglas Coupland

The hearts of the noble are the graves of confidences. — Idries Shah

Conversation over coffee tended to be candid and invited confidences. — Joanne Fluke

Arthur sighed heavily, like he was sorry he ever brought it up, but I knew he wasn't. The more sacred a piece of information, the more desperate the gatekeeper is to reveal it, the harder you have to work to relieve her of the burden. That way she doesn't feel horribly guilty about betraying confidences - what could she do? She was browbeaten into it! — Jessica Knoll

But some secrets are too delicious not to share. — Suzanne Collins

Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors. — Honore De Balzac

Walter Moody was much experienced in the art of confidences. He knew that by confessing, one earned the subtle right to become confessor to the other, in his turn. A secret deserves a secret, and a tale deserves a tale; the gentle expectation of a response in kind was a pressure he knew how to apply. — Eleanor Catton

It is my secrecy which makes you unhappy, my evasions, my silences. And so I have found a solution. Whenever you get desperate with my mysteries, my ambiguities, here is a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. You have always said that I was myself a Chinese puzzle box. When you are in the mood and I baffle your love of confidences, your love of openness, your love of sharing experiences, then open one of the boxes. And in it you will find a story, a story about me and my life. Do you like this idea? Do you think it will help us to live together? — Anais Nin

The life of God within you will make your actions instinct with holiness, and its end shall be everlasting life. Your faith in Christ clearly evinces you to be a new creature, for it kills your old confidences and makes you build upon a new foundation: your love for Christ also shows your newness, for it has killed your old desires, and captured your heart only for Jesus: and your hope, which is also a gift from the blessed Spirit, is set upon new things altogether, while your old hopes are things of which you are now ashamed. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there. — Charles Dickens

His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment. — Diane Setterfield

The children who are appreciated for what they are, even if they are homely, or clumsy, or slow, will grow up with confidences in themselves - happy. They will have a spirit that will make the best of all the capacities that they have, and of all the opportunities that come their way. They will make light of any handicaps. — Benjamin Spock

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable. — Sandor Marai

(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language ... forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening that it may translate them to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness ... In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which daylight would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and furthest recesses. — Theophile Gautier

Attention to detail is the secret of success in every sphere of life, and little kindnesses, little acts of consideration, little appreciations, little confidences, ... they are all that are needed to keep the friendship sweet. — Hugh Black

They meet again at dinner--again, next day-- again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the same exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr. Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly but of place and yet so perfectly at home. They appear to take as little note of one another as any two people enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows--all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts. — Charles Dickens

How she wished she had Elizabeth to herself for a little so they could discuss what Henry's real intentions were and also how high and mighty Penelope had acted at lunch and what a tremendous insult it was that she'd come at all and did anyone really think she was beautiful with those oversize features anyway. — Anna Godbersen

She was actively frightened of imparting confidences, because she feared that they might betray the world of oddness that lived inside her — J.K. Rowling

Even people who are entirely strange and indifferent to one another will exchange confidences if they live together for a while, and a certain intimacy is bound to develop. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage. — Stefan Zweig

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. — J.G. Ballard

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand. — Jenkin Lloyd Jones

Looking at a man as though he was something the horse left behind isn't the way to elicit confidences. — Loretta Chase

I believe it, she's a very good person, kind. There's weariness there, but no bitterness or spite. When you're with a girl like that you feel like a different person. You try to be better, and that's a strain. Men prefer to be friends with her kind, flirt a bit, share confidences. They don't often fall in love with girls like that, but everybody loves them. — Sergei Lukyanenko

Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences. — Thornton Wilder

Really, having a gun registry and having to rely on the government to keep it secret, the government isn't so great at keeping confidences. — Rand Paul

Miss Allison realised with a slight sinking of the heart that she was to be made the recipient of confidences. — Georgette Heyer

A quality person is someone with integrity. To be worthy of the highest trust is a noble attribute and compliment. You will need to maintain confidences. Certainly it is greater to be trusted than loved. Truly happy persons will always be totally honest in their dealings with their fellowman. — Marvin J. Ashton

I remarked in the original Preface to this Book, that I did not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from it, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it was so recent and strong, and my mind was so divided between pleasure and regret - pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions - that I was in danger of wearying the reader with personal confidences and private emotions. — Charles Dickens

In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon - for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A society notorious for effacing the boundary which once separated the private from the public, for making it a public virtue and obligation to publicly expose the private, and for wiping away from public communication anything that resists being reduced to private confidences, together with those who refuse to confide them. — Zygmunt Bauman

Well." Ringil gave the Throne Eternal captain another brittle little smile. "You know, the thing about fucking is, it's a lot less wear and tear than trying to kill each other with bits of steel. And it's the sort of thing that does tend to lead to confidences and favours if you play it right. Ask any woman, she'll tell you that. Unless of course your experiences in that direction are limited, as, come to think of it, yours probably are, to whores and rape. — Richard K. Morgan

After an acquaintance of ten minutes many women will exchange confidences that a man would not reveal to a lifelong friend — Page Smith

In the end, it's only a story of having had her words and secrets, her confidences, turned against her by someone she once believed entirely beyond any acts of betrayal. A story of pettiness and cruelty and of the lies friends will tell when a friendship has ceased to be profitable or convenient. It is a very simple and inexpressibly complex story of cowardice ... — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Confidences pre-announced are seldom worth while. — Robert Aickman

From now on when a boy starts telling me about his lost loves I am going to run in the opposite direction screaming loudly ... Somehow I bring out such confidences, and I'm pretty sick of hearing about Bobbe or Dorothy or P.K. or Liota. God damn them all. — Sylvia Plath

The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall old elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way. As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind ... — Charles Dickens

He was what she wanted, but it would mean so much more after a charged friendship; that long, exquisite exchange of gradually more intimate confidences, the slow accumulation of shared experiences, the languorous spiraling dance of attraction, coming and going and coming and going, winding closer and closer, until that laziness was sublimed in the engulfing heat of consummation. He — Iain M. Banks

It's in the kitchen that confidences are exchanged, that family life takes place; it's among the remains of a meal or when your're elbow-deep in peelings that you ask yourself what life is all about, rather than when you're sunk in an armchair in the sitting room. — Benoite Groult

It was a gusty day, and from the windows of Caroline's top-floor flat, only the sky was visible with its little hurrying clouds. It was a day when being indoors was meaningful, wasting an afternoon in superior confidences with a friend before the two-barred electric heater. — Muriel Spark

Secrets. Funny how, when you're about to be given something precious, something you've wanted for a long time, you suddenly feel nervous over taking it.
Everyone wants more than anything to be allowed into someone else's most secret self. Everyone wants to allow someone into their most secret self. Everyone feels so alone inside that their deepest wish is for someone to know their secret being, because then they are alone no longer. Don't we all long for this? Yet when it's offered it's frightening, because you might not live up to the desires of the one who bestows the gift. And frightening because you know that accepting such a gift means you'll want-perhaps be expected- to offer a similar gift in return. Which means giving your *self* away. And what's more frightening than that? — Aidan Chambers

A rector lives in a web of pretty secrets, and confidences and warnings, and the wiser he is the less he will regard them. He — E. M. Forster