Quotes & Sayings About Telling Secrets

Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: 'My worth is my sexuality. I'm dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries.' That shapes their ideas about the world around them: 'No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can't be trusted.' It doesn't take long for children to being to act in accordance with these belief systems.
For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant. — Rachel Lloyd

The only thing scarier than telling my secrets would be keeping them. When the "sensitive information" you carry is your own history, going mute to protect the system doesn't keep you from being destroyed; it just means that you destroy yourself. — Martha N. Beck

I pick up my knitting and wind the yarn around my fingers so I can finish the row. The needles whisper softly as they slide against each other, as if telling secrets. — Lynn Austin

You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There's the telephone, and the fax - and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You've got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely. — Jodi Picoult

It was weird to hear Grace this way. It was weird to be here, sitting in my car with her best friend when Grace was home, needing me for once. It was weird to want to tell her that we didn't need to go to the studio until things calmed down. But I couldn't tell her no. I physically couldn't say it to her. Hearing her like this ... she was a different thing than I'd ever seen her be, and I felt some dangerous and lovely future whispering secrets in my ear. I said, "I wish it were Sunday, too."
"I don't want to be alone tonight," Grace said.
Something in my heart twinged. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again. I thought about sneaking over myself; I thought about telling her to sneak out. I imagined lying in my bedroom beneath my paper cranes, with the warm shape of her tucked against me, not having to worry about hiding in the morning, just having her with me on our terms, and I ached and ached some more with the force of wanting it. I echoed, "I miss you, too. — Maggie Stiefvater

In truth, this was a bad thing that Yan Chang had done, telling me my mother's story. Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth. After — Amy Tan

How can she stand up there so tall as she's telling us how her mother beat her and her father molested her when she was a little girl? How is it possible for her to look so proud? How is she not being consumed by shame? She should be disintegrating before our eyes. She should be struck by lightning, and God's big, angry, booming voice should be shaking the room with "How dare you? I told you never to tell." But that's not her God, she says. Her God is loving and kind and wants what's best for her. Her God loves peace and serenity and forgiveness. Her God doesn't make her keep secrets. I thought I knew God all my life, but maybe it was some other guy the whole time. I want this God. I want Val's God. I want a God who doesn't make me jump through hoops and hate myself to earn his love. — Amy Reed

All at once it seemed like too much of a betrayal to continue to pretend that his brother was delirious, hallucinating, not in his right mind. Lying when he was telling the truth. Maybe Kenzie was right-maybe secrets were more the problem than the solution. Maybe Kenzie was the only clearheaded person in that room.
And yet-he couldn't supress a twinge of fear that if he told the truth, he'd never see Emma again. Never hear her music again. Their musical connection was the closest he'd ever come to slacking his thirst for a human touch. — Cinda Williams Chima

So when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you? — Peter Thiel

It was her grandfather who'd told her the tale of this particular violin, over and over, as if the telling could stave off loss, as if the weight and scope of human history were not found in books or in those mythic universities in Rome and Naples that no one in their village had ever seen but, rather, were encoded in objects like this one, a violin touched by hundreds of hands, loved, used, stroked, pressed, made to outlive its owners, storing their secrets and lies — Carolina De Robertis

Throughout our times with Christopher [therapist] we were encouraged to work together at communicating on the inside. He pointed out that it would be good for us all to listen-in when an alter was telling his/her story - that it's now safe, no harm will come to us from telling or from knowing. There was once a time when it was very important that we didn't know what had happened; that knowing meant danger or being so overwhelmed with pain and grief that we wouldn't survive. But now it was different. We're safe and strong, and our goal now are to uncover the grisly truth of what's happened to us, so that it's no longer a powerful secret. We can look at it and face the past for what it is - old memories of old events. Today is now,and we can choose to live a different way and believe different things. We were once powerless and vulnerable, but now we were in a position to make choices. We had control over our life. — Carolyn Bramhall

Be very chary of telling your hoarded secrets. Many lose all power once they have been divulged. Be even more careful of sharing your own secrets lest you find yourself a puppet dancing on someone else's strings. — Robin Hobb

It was always the secrets that hurt us, wasn't it? Not the telling of them. — Betsy Cornwell

I've sometimes regretted the women I've been.

There have been so many: daughter, sister, cop, tough broad, several kinds of whore, jilted lover, ideal wife, heroine, killer.

I'll provide the truth of them all, inasmuch as I'm capable of telling the truth.

Keeping secrets, telling lies, they require the same skill. Both become a habit, almost an addiction, that's hard to break even with the people closest to you, out of the business.

They say never trust a woman who tells you her age; if she can't keep that secret, she can't keep yours.

I'm fifty-nine. — Becky Masterman

Secrets you were telling everybody but me.. Don't be fooled by the money I'm still just young and unlucky, I'm surprised you couldn't tell — Drake

Telling secrets to a writer is like embracing a pickpocket. — David Grossman

I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley's like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger." "What are you talking about?" said Harry. "The diary," said Riddle. "My diary. Little Ginny's been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes - how her brothers tease her, how she had to come to school with secondhand robes and books, how" - Riddle's eyes glinted - "how she didn't think famous, good, great Harry Potter would ever like her. . . . — J.K. Rowling

The night we met, we started off with coffee and politics, but it was one of those nights where you just can't stop talking. Where you're finishing each other's sentences, and it's like you've just met.. but also like you've known each other forever. Where you find yourself telling secrets that you've never told anyone else before in your life. — Steph Campbell

The heart cherishes secrets not worth the telling — Stephen R. Donaldson

In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information. — Bell Hooks

And the leaves were telling secrets to the wind. — Peter Mulvey

Fear is dangerous, not the tarot. The tarot represents the spectrum of the human condition, the good, the evil, the light, and the dark. Do not fear the darker aspects of the human condition. Understand them. The tarot is a storybook about life, about the greatness of human accomplishment, and also the ugliness we are each capable of. — Benebell Wen

You will see the effects of dark secrets making themselves known
via their minds and bodies and via the stories your friends ... will begin telling you ... The only payback for all of this
for the conversion of their once-young hearts into tar
will be that you will love your friends more, even though they have made you see the universe as an emptier and scarier place ... — Douglas Coupland

But it is important always to keep in mind that the danger of harming humans is not connected only or even mainly with telling secrets, there can be great danger in keeping secrets. — Daniel Ellsberg

I am at the hospital waiting for my friend with Noah. Which is a very couple-like thing to do. All you have to do is watch any teen drama - anytime one of the characters is close to death and/or in a coma, the boyfriend/girlfriend teams always end up at the hospital together.
We are eating together. (Another coupley thing to do.)
We are talking about my best friend, his girlfriend, and their secret problems that she somehow neglected to tell me. Which means that Noah is the one telling me secrets that even my best friend won't.
I like it. All of it. Being here, eating food, telling secrets, everything — Lauren Barnholdt

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore.
"By telling you my life's story.
"See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like:
TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS!
or
BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS!
"Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday.
"I am tomorrow. — Aravind Adiga

I hope to turn my reader into the quiet person in the corner who, even when no one is telling them anything, sees everything. — Damali Ayo

I shut my eyes, assaulted by a sudden vision of Bruce and his new girl in his wide, warm bed, his arm wrapped companionably around her, telling my family secrets ... and the new girl would give a wise, professionally compassionate kindergarten-teacher nod, all the while thinking what a freak I must be. — Jennifer Weiner

We can reveal that John's 85
That's a well known fact
Telling Kathy's age would be a breach
Of the Official Secrets Act — John Walter Bratton

To the glee of the British press, a letter has recently been discovered. The letter had been sent to Christopher Columbus, a decade after the Croft affair in Bristol, while Columbus was taking bows for his discovery of America. The letter, from Bristol merchants, alleged that he knew perfectly well that they had been to America already. It is not known if Columbus ever replied. He didn't need to. Fishermen were keeping their secrets, while explorers were telling the world. Columbus had claimed the entire new world for Spain. — Mark Kurlansky

Can I possibly be a good writer if I'm not healed form the story I'm telling? Will I be able to go deep enough if people find out the truth? — Lori Lesko

My story made the headlines from the local paper to national press. I released my name and my story to allow other victims to know that regardless of the time that has passed, it is never too late to seek help.

It was through this process I was offered a chance to put my story into words and write a book. I had never thought of telling my secrets to everyone before, but when I was approached to do so, it just felt like the right thing to do to help other child victims of crime. I knew my story would give other people hope and that was very important to me — Tina Renton

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down ... Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads. — Garrett Hedlund

I assumed I would be better off telling you about this, rather than waiting for the entire thing to blow up in my face. — Courtney Milan

No ... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands of them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened, unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this ... all this ... — William Gaddis

You don't know how to respond," Ferrin said. "I'll make it easy for you. The safest course of action for your young rebellion would be to toss me off the tallest cliff you can find. I have played a perilous game for years
trading secrets, telling lies, finding leverage, earning trust only to betray it. I got away with an eccentric lifestyle among Maldor's elite by hiding much of what I learned and proving myself too valuable to kill. It was a precarious, unforgiving game. When I released you from Felrook, I miscalculated, and I lost Game over. Bridges burned. But the game is part of my nature. I don't think I can stop playing until I stop breathing. — Brandon Mull

Every flower is telling you the secrets of life; to understand, you have to listen to them with your heart. — Debasish Mridha

His fingertips felt like whispers, telling my skin secrets. — Karina Halle

It felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that - whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as code for all the things you love about each other. — Francesca Lia Block

There are two secrets to a successful marriage. The first is having a husband who makes you laugh. The second is never telling your husband what you're laughing at. — John Hartnett

Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time. — David Morrell

Some of them will welcome me as small boys do a teacher, telling me the little secrets better to conceal the big ones.For I tell you, that secrets are not kept by being secretive; — Talbot Mundy

Nope. You didn't miss much." "Somehow, I find that hard to believe." Thalia raised her shoulders in an attempt to sit up, but settled back down with a groan. Clarke gently placed a rolled-up blanket behind her. "Thanks," she muttered and surveyed Clarke for a moment before she spoke again. "Okay, what's wrong?" Clarke gave her a bemused smile. "Nothing! I'm just so happy you're feeling better." "Please. You can't hide anything from me. You know I always manage to get your secrets out of you," Thalia deadpanned. "You can start by telling me where you found the medicine." "Octavia — Kass Morgan

Once exposed, a secret loses all its power. — Ann Aguirre

Stories are about secrets. We all have them. Secret dreams, fantasies, hopes and sometimes even desires. Occasionally a dream becomes reality and then maybe there are a million reasons for not telling anybody about it. — Rob Hopcott

Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.
Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.
Their language has been lost.
But not the gestures. — Vera Nazarian

Historia abscondita. - Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places - into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past remains essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed! — Friedrich Nietzsche

So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I was applying for campus housing and overheard Andy telling my mother that the only way I was going to be safe from all the sexual assaults he'd heard about on National Public Radio was if I lived in an all-girl dorm.
Never mind that I have been kicking the butts of the undead since I was in elementary school, and that almost the entire time I resided under Andy's roof, I had a hot undead guy living in my bedroom. These are two of those secrets I was telling you about. Andy doesn't know about them, and neither does my mother. They think Jesse is what Father Dominic told them he is: a "young Jesuit student who transferred to the Carmel Mission from Mexico, then lost his yearning to go into the priesthood" after meeting me.
That one slays me every time. — Meg Cabot

Was I a secret not worth sharing
Or
Was I a fact not worth telling? — Dawn Lanuza

Why am I telling you this?" he went on. "A secret's only a secret as long as you keep it. Once you tell someone it loses all its power--for good or for ill--like that, it's just another piece of information. But a real mystery can't be solved, not completely. It's always just out of reach, like a light around the corner; you might catch a glimpse of what it reveals, feel its warmth, but you can't know the heart of it, not really. That's what gives it value: It can't be cracked, it's bigger than you and me, bigger than everything we know. Those tight-ass suits can keep their secrets, they don't add up to anything. This deep in the game, pal, I'll take mystery every time. — Mark Frost

Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth. — Michael Chabon

I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard. — Lauren Wolk

I feel that telling my secrets makes me less vulnerable. What would make me vulnerable are the secrets I keep. — Isabel Allende

He felt like telling her his secrets, opening his heart to her, with the same honesty and freedom with which, the previous night, she had opened her body to him. — Paulo Coelho

When I opened a book now, I was seized with desperation. I felt as if I was madly in love. It was as if I were in a confession booth and the characters in the book were on the other side telling me their most intimate secrets. When I read, I was a philosopher and it was up to me to figure out the meaning of things. Reading made me feel as if I were the center of the universe. — Heather O'Neill

Being someone's best friend doesn't always mean telling them every tiny thing about yourself, you know. Sometimes it means having enough trust to let them have their secrets and still be there for them. — Liz Kessler

Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts. — Holly Black

When you called last night I was waiting for news. If God Himself had called me and started telling me the secrets of the universe, I would have told Him to go f**k Himself, too. You can't take me personally, Zach. Can I make it up to you? Coffee? Tea? Me?"

Zach laughed. Even exhausted she was still shameless. — Tiffany Reisz

Every rose that is sweet-scented within, That rose is telling of the secrets of the Universal. — Rumi

Eleanor should never have told them about Park's house, but she'd been dying to tell somebody. (This was how people ended up in jail after committing the perfect crime.) — Rainbow Rowell

Then all was quiet, except for that murmurous half telling, half withholding of tremendous secrets that the sea would keep up all night. Each little wave seemed to say, "I'll tell you-" and then pull back with a smothered "Oh!" to be followed by another wave saying, "Then I will say-" but whatever it was remained unsaid and unsayable. — L.M. Boston

There are some tales not for telling, whether because they are too long, too precious, too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain. After all, after years and travels my secrets are all I have left to chew on in the night. — Emma Donoghue

The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it. — Doris Lessing

Sometimes knowing is torture. You wish you could hide your secret away in a dark, cobwebby shed, shut the door, and break the key in the lock, so no one can ever get in again. You wish that you could go to sleep and have your last thought be anything but the buttery light of the New Mexico moon sneaking in through the cracks of an old barn's walls. But you can't erase the knowing, and you can never tell your secret. If there is one thing this world as taught me, it's that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse. Secrets should stay secrets. It keeps them tolerable. Telling secrets turn them into full-on hell. — Tawni Waters

The truth is like sunlight: It causes cancer. — J. Richard Singleton

... he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone - riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria - even dancing, she danced alone - and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved. — Tim O'Brien

My mother's mouth drops. 'Emmy...don't say those things Emmy. Remember, we don't talk about those things.'

'Yes Mom. I remember. That's why I'm here, looking like this.'

An orderly knocks on the door and announces that visiting time is over.

My mother and I look at each other awkwardly, and hug.

'I love you,' she says.

'I love you too, Mom.'

'You aren't telling them too much are you?' she asks, afraid.

I sign. 'No Mommy, I'm not.'

She's visibly relieved. She leaves the room.

The orderley comes back and escorts me back into the main room.

I just sit and laugh to myself."

(after Emmy's suicide attempt) ~ The Finer Points of Becoming Machine — Emily Andrews

It feels like the city is telling secrets down here, privy only to those who think to listen. — Gayle Forman

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant. — Kate Morton