Secret Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Secret. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
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Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets)
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Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.
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Roald Dahl
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And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
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Antoine de Saint-ExupΓ©ry (The Little Prince)
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The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.
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Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)
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Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.
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Stephen King
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How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
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Anne Frank (Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables, and Lesser-Known Writings)
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Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
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Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
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Oscar Wilde (Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories)
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The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.
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Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (The Teaching of Buddha)
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Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
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Antoine de Saint-ExupΓ©ry
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All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.
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Lemony Snicket
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Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
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Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanack)
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If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
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George Orwell (1984)
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Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody β€” no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.
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Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You)
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You can't stop the future You can't rewind the past The only way to learn the secret ...is to press play.
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Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)
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A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
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Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
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Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate And though I oft have passed them by A day will come at last when I Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun.
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J.R.R. Tolkien
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I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)
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E.E. Cummings
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People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.
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Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
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What happened down in the dungeons between you and Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally the whole school knows.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.
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Albert Camus (A Happy Death)
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I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
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Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets)
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One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.
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Lewis Carroll
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I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
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Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
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Everyone has secrets. It's just a matter of finding out what they are.
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Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1))
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Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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The secret to getting ahead is getting started.
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Mark Twain
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In secret we met In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive.
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Lord Byron
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The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
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Groucho Marx
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Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Oh well... I'd just been thinking, if you had died, you'd have been welcome to share my toilet.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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I'd learned that some things are best kept secret.
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Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)
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I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
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Rainer Maria Rilke
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I think I've discovered the secret of life -- you just hang around until you get used to it.
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Charles M. Schulz
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Of all the trees we could've hit, we had to get one that hits back.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size But when I start to tell them, They think I'm telling lies. I say, It's in the reach of my arms The span of my hips, The stride of my step, The curl of my lips. I'm a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me.
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Maya Angelou (Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women)
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How awfully convenient for you, regardless. And for him. He won't have to worry about you spilling his secrets." "Yeah," Jace said. "He's terrified I'll tell everyone that he's always wanted to be a ballerina.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
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I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.
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Poppy Z. Brite
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Honestly, if you were any slower, you’d be going backward.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
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Nikola Tesla
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If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
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Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
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There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.
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Countee Cullen
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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
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Alan W. Watts
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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 utterβ€” they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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I thought about how there are two types of secrets: the kind you want to keep in, and the kind you don't dare to let out.
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Ally Carter (Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (Gallagher Girls, #3))
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Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
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C.G. Jung
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A kiss is a secret which takes the lips for the ear.
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Edmond Rostand (Cyrano de Bergerac)
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A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.
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Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
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Ginny!" said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. "Haven't I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain?
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
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Stephen King
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The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage.
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Carrie Jones (Need (Need, #1))
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Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high.
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William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
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The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
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Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World)
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We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
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Amy Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses)
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I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.
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Edward Hirsch
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The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
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AnaΓ―s Nin
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I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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You don't love a girl because of beauty. You love her because she sings a song only you can understand.
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L.J. Smith (Secret Vampire (Night World, #1))
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Name one hero who was happy." I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back. "You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward. "I can't." "I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret." "Tell me." I loved it when he was like this. "I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it." "Why me?" "Because you're the reason. Swear it." "I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes. "I swear it," he echoed. We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned. "I feel like I could eat the world raw.
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Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
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Well, you're expelling us aren't you?" said Ron. "Not today, Mr. Weasley." Snape looked as though Christmas had been canceled.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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Read, read, read. That's all I can say.
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Carolyn Keene (The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, #1))
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Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.
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Jonathan Ames (My Less Than Secret Life: A Diary, Fiction, Essays)
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To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.
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Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
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Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.
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Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)
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Sonnet XVII I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
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Pablo Neruda
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I'll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I'm not there.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.
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Henry Green
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It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
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John Joseph Powell (The Secret of Staying in Love)
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It's true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get in a person's blood even if he doesn't remember having them.
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Eva Ibbotson (The Secret of Platform 13)
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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We all fight our own private wars.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"... "It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...
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Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
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But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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Secrets have power. And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it's really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours.
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Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
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When in doubt, go to the library.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else.
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Pseudonymous Bosch (The Name of This Book Is Secret (Secret, #1))
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I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
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Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
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Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
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C.S. Lewis
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I run for I don't know how long. Hours, maybe, or days. Alex told me to run. So I run. You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way. But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope,and without fear. I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.
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Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
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A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley...He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
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...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.
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Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
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To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home.
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Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
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Harry β€” I think I've just understood something! I've got to go to the library!” And she sprinted away, up the stairs. β€œWhat does she understand?” said Harry distractedly, still looking around, trying to tell where the voice had come from. β€œLoads more than I do,” said Ron, shaking his head. β€œBut why’s she got to go to the library?” β€œBecause that’s what Hermione does,” said Ron, shrugging. β€œWhen in doubt, go to the library.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
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In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
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C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
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This is for girls who have the tendency to stay up at night listening to music that reminds them of their current situation. Who hide their fears, hurt, pain and tears under the smiles, laughs and giggles on a daily basis. The girls who wear their heart on their sleeve. The girls who pray that things will work out just once and they'll be satisfied. The girls who sceam and cry to their pillows because everyone else fails to listen. The girls who have so many secrets but wont tell a soul. The girls who have mistakes and regrets as a daily moral. The girls that never win. The girls that stay up all night thinking about that one boy and hoping that he'll notice her one day. The girls who take life as it comes, to the girls who are hoping that it'll get better somewhere down the road. For the girls who love with all their heart although it always gets broken. To girls who think it's over. To real girls, to all girls: You're beautiful.
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Zayn Malik
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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
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Hermann Hesse (BΓ€ume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte)
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It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.
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Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
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I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.
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Lemony Snicket