Secret Doors Quotes & Sayings

When God has become a business, though, it is very hard for people to get the confidence to realize that God is really a personal God, a God who touches us as individuals, a God who is as close to us as we choose to see. We have learned well the remoteness of a God who lived for so long behind communion rails and altar steps and seminary doors and chancery desks that the experience of God, however strong, has always been more private secret than public expectation. — Joan D. Chittister

The story of my life is about back entrances, side doors, secret elevators and other ways of getting in and out of places so that people won't bother me. — Greta Garbo

Do not have as your motive the desire to be known as a praying man. Get an inner chamber in which to pray where no one knows you are praying, shut the door, and talk to God in secret. — Oswald Chambers

There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors.
The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It's a sacrifice, of sorts. — Neil Gaiman

And then he left the palace to roam the streets of Ombria, where he painted shadows as he searched for light within them, painted thick, barred doors, as he searched in their hewn, scarred grains for what it was they hid, painted high windowless walls as if, rebuilding them stone by stone on paper, he could dismantle them and finally see the secret life behind the real. — Patricia A. McKillip

As great Pythagoras of yore,
Standing beside the blacksmith's door,
And hearing the hammers, as they smote
The anvils with a different note,
Stole from the varying tones, that hung
Vibrant on every iron tongue,
The secret of the sounding wire.
And formed the seven-chorded lyre. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

For a month already I was carrying on my affair with him, the whole month behind the closed doors of his office with hot wet kisses, with top secret papers scattered on the floor thrown off the table in haste, Georg rolling his eyes at yet another cancelled meeting and the order not to disturb the Chief of the RSHA, winks and hidden smiles through the half opened door, and the two of us smelling of each other's perfume. And with every day I was sinking deeper and deeper in that swamp, and didn't even try to grab the ground that was right next to me. I was disgusted with myself like an alcoholic who wakes up in a pile of dirt, but crawls right back to the pub to fill himself again with the poisonous liquor slowly killing him with every new sip. — Ellie Midwood

Power dies, power goes under and gutters out, ungraspable. It is momentary, quick of flight and liable to deceive. As soon as you rely on the possession it is gone. Forget that it ever existed, and it returns. I never made the mistake of thinking that I owned my own strength, that was my secret. And so I never was alone in my failures. I was never to blame entirely when all was lost, when my desperate cures had no effect on the suffering of those I loved. For who can blame a man waiting, the doors open, the windows open, food offered, arms stretched wide? Who can blame him if the visitor does not arrive. — Louise Erdrich

The Land of Dreams, that mystical realm,
where the oddest of visions appear,
come wander through scenes of joyful peace,
or stampeded through nightmares of fear.
Dare we open those secret doors,
down dusty paths of mind,
in long-forgotten corners,
what memories we'll find.
Who rules o'er the Kingdom of Night,
where all is not what it seems?
'Tis I, the Weaver of Tales,
for I am the Dreamer of Dreams! — Brian Jacques

Perhaps we don't like what we see: our hips, our loss of hair, our shoe size, our dimples, our knuckles too big, our eating habits, our disposition. We have disclosed these things in secret, likes and dislikes, behind doors with locks, our lonely rooms, our messy desks, our empty hearts, our sudden bursts of energy, our sudden bouts of depression. Don't worry. Put away your mirrors and your beauty magazines and your books on tape. There is someone right here who knows you more than you do, who is making room on the couch, who is fixing a meal, who is putting on your favorite record, who is listening intently to what you have to say, who is standing there with you, face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. There is no space left uncovered. This is where you belong. — Sufjan Stevens

The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free. - Green Shadows, White Whale — Ray Bradbury

Do you remember that old TV series, Get Smart? Do you remember at the beginning where Maxwell Smart is walking down the secret corridor and there are all of those doors that open sideways, and upside down and gateways and stuff? I think that everyone keeps a whole bunch of doors just like this between themselves and the world. But when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together. — Douglas Coupland

There's really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward - opening up new doors and doing new things - because we're curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We're always exploring and experimenting. We call it Imagineering - the blending of creative and imagination with technical know-how. — Walt Disney

The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places - under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary ... — Eric Gamalinda

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va. — Evgeny Morozov

And I could test myself - my own courage - with it, too, because when the doors at either end of the secret staircase were closed, it was impenetrably dark. I hid in the staircase, shivering with terror, telling the narrative: The little girl was in a dark, dark place but she was very brave ... Sometimes the door at the bottom opened, and a wedge of light sliced up the stairs; a maid, her arms filled with folded laundry, would find me and ask in amazement what I was doing there.
And though I answered lightheartedly that I was playing, the truth is that I was not entirely certain what I was doing there, crouched and frightened in the darkness. Only now, sixty years later, do I see that I was arming myself, rehearsing panic, loss, and helplessness; assessing my own cowardice and courage, and and the same time reassuring myself that the door would always open, that the light would always find its way in. — Lois Lowry

The glass doors stared back at me like a secret passageway, moonlight filtering in and adding to the effect. I swallowed again, my heart pounding. What an exhilarating emotion this was. Exhilarating and terrifying. Nothing had ever made me feel so overwhelmed, so ethereal. Of all the new mysteries in my life, this was the most wrenching. Everything would change now, I knew. (Lily from Seers of Light) — Jennifer DeLucy

I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kane pulled a key from a piece of thread around his neck that looked just like the skeleton key Gerald had given Peter the night before, and slid it into the keyhole. "Welcome," said Kane dramatically, as he pushed the doors open, "to the complete and secret history of the Watchers. — C.A. Gray

I feel like my imagination was crafted by Tolkien. He seemed to tap into that childhood intrigue of secret doors and hidden worlds. — Richard C. Armitage

I took my time exploring. I savored the first minutes in a new home. Carlos would always go straight to unpacking boxes, looking for the sheets and coffeepot and swearing that we were going to get better organized, while I stepped stealthily over the bare floors, peeking around corners and into alluring doors, which generally turned out to be the broom closet. But there was that thrilling sense that, like a new lover, the place held attributes I had yet to discover. My favorite book as a child was _The Secret Garden_. It's embarrassing to think I'd merrily relocated again and again, accompanying Carlos to the ends of the earth, because of the lure of a possible garret or secret closet. But it might be true. — Barbara Kingsolver

To those who have not yet learned the secret of true happiness, begin now to study the little things in your own door yard. — George Washington Carver

I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream. — Donna Tartt

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. — Carl Jung

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit ... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul. — Guy De Maupassant

Hummer with six doors to a side and black-tinted windows for maximum privacy. "What I'm talking a-bout!" cried Sergeant Dime as he pounced on the bar, everyone whooping over all the pimp finery, but after destroying all hopes for a quick recovery Billy subsides into a gnarled, secret funk. "Billy," says — Ben Fountain

President Obama spent Election Day away from any press coverage, attending closed-door meetings inside the White House. But on the bright side, it is nice to see some doors actually closed at the White House. It's a whole new Secret Service security thing. — Jimmy Fallon

Excuse me, Abigail, but whose shift did she get away during?' Townsend asked with a glare.
'Excuse me, Townsend, but who was supposed to booby-trap the doors?'
'I'm an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service,' Townsend said, indignant. 'I do not do booby traps. — Ally Carter

Nonethless it had been a castle, with all that this implies: it had had towering walls and turrets, beams as great as trees, arched doorways wide enough for processions to pass through, ceilings so cavernous that owls nested in them. It had had wings and ramparts and thin windows from which to shoot arrows, internal courtyards, banquet rooms, hidden doors, secret passages. It had had a chapel and, in its bowels, a dungeon. It housed sculptures and paintings, tapestries and cushions, carpets and carvings, its fortressed heart had been clad in glit, silver, glass, gold, damask, ivory, ermine. — Sonya Hartnett

As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one. — Stewart O'Nan

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frozen night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:
"At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he,
"I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond 'The Drover', a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps. — Edward Thomas

If you're interested in opening the doors to the heavens, start with the door to your own secret self. See what happens when you offer to another a glimpse of who you truly are. When your heart is undefended, you make it safe for whomever you meet to put down his burden of hiding, and then you both can walk through the open door. — Elizabeth Lesser

Some things, I think, like fairy books and secret doors, are only meant to be found by children. — Jennifer McMahon

Selfishness, like Jimmy the Shrimp, works underground. Most people don't even realize it is there, which is precisely why it is so dangerous. Selfishness works in secret, behind closed doors, on the black market, plotting and planning our destruction. Selfishness is the Mob boss of the soul. In fact, without selfishness, you wouldn't have murder, hate, holocaust, slander, genocide, betrayal, or crooked lawyers - because those are all the convoluted results of Jimmy the Shrimp's regime. Simply put, selfishness is the sickness behind all other sicknesses. — Eric Ludy

The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret. — Lily Gardner

Whatever happens to you, don't fall in despair. Even if all the doors are closed, a secret path will be there for you that no one knows. You can't see it yet but so many paradises are at the end of this path. Be grateful! It is easy to thank after obtaining what you want, thank before having what you want. — Elif Shafak

I loved them in the way one loves at any age - if it's real at all - obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them; I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening, don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world - and in a way, I suppose they were." She had spoken rapidly, on the defensive ... if he thought she didn't know what she was talking about! "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self. — May Sarton

Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Prayer is like a secret garden made up of silence and rest and inwardness. But there are a thousand and one doors into this garden and we all have to find our own. — Jean Vanier

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors. — Sylvia Plath

Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. — Sue Monk Kidd

Bond again walked round the room. This time he carefully inspected the walls and the neighbourhood of the bed and the telephone. Why not take the room? Why would there be microphones or secret doors? What would be the point of them? — Ian Fleming

Well I know the secret places, And the nests in hedge and tree; At what doors are friendly faces, In what hearts are thoughts of me. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass by informs your back that she is daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own. — Toni Morrison

The sky was growing dangerously light when I left Lestat and made my way to the secret place, below an abandoned building where I kept the iron coffin in which I lie.
This is no unusual configuration among our kind-the sad old building, my title to it, or the cellar room cut off from the world above by iron doors no mortal could independently seek to lift. — Anne Rice

Okay, gang," I said, "according to blueprints, there's an elevator access panel on the east side of the building. We may get a little dirty, but - "
"I thought we'd just go through the doors," Liz said, flashing three beautifully engraved invitations and some wonderfully authentic fake IDs.
The tickets were $20,000 each. The Secret Service had been vetting the guest list for weeks, so Bex and I stopped beneath a streetlamp and studied Liz.
"Do I even want to know where you got those?" I asked.
Liz seemed to ponder it, and then she said, "No. — Ally Carter

I didn't understand for a long time, but what attracted me to MtAoFC [Mastering the Art of French Cooking] was the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it. I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility. — Julie Powell

The politics of the Cape Town Metro, which allows an executive Mayoral committee to make secret decisions which affect you, behind closed doors, is wrong! — Mangosuthu Buthelezi

People will never know how hard it is to get information, especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp 'top secret' on the color of the walls. — Helen Thomas

And now it's your turn.
You're the only one left, and I know you're here, somewhere. Maybe you're in the back of one of the closets, whimpering a prayer that I won't find you. Maybe you've holed up in some secret hiding place you've known about since childhood and are damning me to hell, hoping I'll grow tired of this game we're playing and just leave you alone.
This IS a big house. But I am very thorough.
You've been very patient as I've gone around blocking the doors and wedging the windows shut. I didn't hear a peep out of you, even though you must have known that each scrape of wood, each rattle of metal meant another escape route closed off. Maybe you've accepted that there is NO escape. — Stefan R. Dziemianowicz

There are other ways than conventional doors to get around my house, Ms Rainn. — S.A. Tawks

I want the rain to follow me, to mark me with a stripe down my chest and belly, to darken my skin, and blacken my hair. I want to be broken, to be eaten by the anonymous mouths, to be eroded like minutes and seconds, to be reduced to water and a little light. I want to rise, the doors of the rain to open, I will enter, rain alive among my fingers, embroidered on my tongue, and brilliant in my eyes, I want to carry it in my shirt pocket, devote my life to the discovery of its secret, the one blessing it whispers. Rain — Li-Young Lee

If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men at Forty"

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices trying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses. — Donald Justice

What I know for sure is this: The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal for this year is, you can get there - as long as you're willing to be honest with yourself about the preparation and work involved. There are no back doors, no free rides. There's just you, this moment, and a choice. — Oprah Winfrey

Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, she who was out of doors in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he marvelled at the strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which was able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his own secret desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed its occupant, the soul, to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. — Marcel Proust

Wishbone

Half-eaten chicken
lying on white serving plate
quartered potatoes
chunks of carrots
celery too
we tell stories
and laugh about the day
your little finger is locked around the wishbone
so is mine
I pretend to make a wish
close my eyes
mumbling my lips
that's the way I faked out the nuns
pretending to say the rosary
so they would leave me alone
your face is so determined
you win the wrestling match
lifting your piece of chicken bone above your head
in victory
I know better than to ask
what did you wish for
secret desires of the heart are not to be shared
or
they won't come true
everyone knows that
you clean the dishes
I turn on the TV
lying on the couch
listening to you make music
with running water
and closing cupboard doors. — Robert Hobkirk

If you're interested in the door to the heavens opening, start with the door to your own secret self. — Elizabeth Lesser

Some of this story is completely true. And some of it isn't. Like truth, evil comes in all sorts of flavors. Some bitter. Some deceptively sweet. Sometimes it comes with a heavy price. While most people don't invite evil into their lives, the dirty little secret is that an invitation isn't necessary. Locked doors don't matter. Neither do fancy security systems. Evil is kind of amazing when you think about it. She knows how to get inside. — Gregg Olsen

Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn't be coming back to, walking and talking and cutting lard into flour and slicing fish from their spines and acting as if it were an acceptable thing, this living. — Tom Franklin

Journeying through secret doors, curving corridors, and connecting rooms into the mountain was like being digested by the different organs of a deity. — Alex Grey

The secret to success is written on the doors of this auditorium. One side says 'Push,' the other side says 'Pull. — Judith Crist