113 Secrets Of Life Quotes

Life is an intricate tapestry woven with moments of joy, challenges, and profound insights. Throughout history, thinkers, philosophers, and everyday people have sought to uncover the secrets that make life meaningful. In this collection, we bring you 113 of the most enlightening secrets of life quotes. Each quote serves as a nugget of wisdom, offering guidance, inspiration, or a comforting reminder of what truly matters. Whether you are searching for a new perspective, motivation, or a deeper understanding of life's mysteries, these quotes promise to resonate with the seeker in you. Join us as we explore these timeless words that continue to spark reflection and understanding in the journey of life.

1. “A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” - Diane Arbus

2. “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” - C.G. Jung

3. “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” - George Orwell

4. “And I must draft an advertisement for the Daily Prophet, too,' he added thoughtfully. 'We'll be needing a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.... Dear me, we do seem to run through them, don't we?” - J.K. Rowling

5. “THE LUXE IS . . .Pretty girls in pretty dresses, partying until dawn.Irresistible boys with mischievous smiles and dangerous intentions.White lies, dark secrets, and scandalous hookups.This is Manhattan in 1899.” - Anna Godbersen

6. “I'd learned that some things are best kept secret.” - Nicholas Sparks

7. “Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

8. “The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together.” - Carolyn Parkhurst

9. “The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.” - Margaret Atwood

10. “There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.” - John Barrymore Jr.

11. “Secrets...are the very root of cool.” - William Gibson

12. “Nothing Stays Secret Forever” - Jennifer R. Hubbard

13. “A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

14. “I've learned that we're all entitled to have our secrets.” - Nicholas Sparks

15. “That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions.” - Sherman Alexie

16. “Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.” - Michel Foucault

17. “England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.” - George Orwell

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

19. “That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.” - Kate Morton

20. “Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.” - Holly Black

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

22. “People were crazy with pain and secrets.” - Anna Funder

23. “And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies. ” - Sue Miller

24. “How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.” - Andrew Sean Greer

25. “We can always find each other, we girls with secrets.” - Crystal Renn

26. “The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.” - Henry Green

27. “The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?” - Kim Edwards

28. “Secrets had an immense attraction to him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.” - Kenneth Grahame

29. “So he was queer, E.M. Forster. It wasn't his middle name (that would be 'Morgan'), but it was his orientation, his romping pleasure, his half-secret, his romantic passion. In the long-suppressed novel Maurice the title character blurts out his truth, 'I'm an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.' It must have felt that way when Forster came of sexual age in the last years of the 19th century: seriously risky and dangerously blurt-able. The public cry had caught Wilde, exposed and arrested him, broken him in prison. He was one face of anxiety to Forster; his mother was another. As long as she lived (and they lived together until she died, when he was 66), he couldn't let her know.” - Michael Levenson

30. “I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.” - Pat Conroy

31. “People, in my long experience, want to talk. They may believe they wish to keep secrets, and they may believe that they are capable of doing so. But the truth is that secrets exist to be revealed; and it is usually very easy to find the combination of words that will cause them to emerge.” - J. Robert Lennon

32. “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.” - Ally Carter

33. “It is absolutely okay with me if you need to keep some secrets. I've been thinking about this and I decided that a best friend is someone who, when they don't understand, they still understand.” - Nancy Werlin

34. “Secrets have a way of making themselves felt, even before you know there's a secret.” - Jean Ferris

35. “She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.” - Khaled Hosseini

36. “But the aspect of secrets is they leak out. If they didn't leak, they wouldn't be interesting.” - Clamp

37. “There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted the Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly error, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

38. “What a skeletal wreck of man this is.Translucent flesh and feeble bones,the kind of temple where the whores and villains try to tempt the holistic domes.Running rampid with free thought to free form, and the free and clear.When the matters at hand are shelled out like lint at alaundry mat to sift and focus on the bigger, better, now.We all have a little sin that needs venting,virtues for the rending and laws and systems and stems are rippedfrom the branches of office, do you know where your post entails? Do you serve a purpose, or purposely serve?When in doubt inside your atavistic allure, the value of a summer spent, and a winter earned.For the rest of us, there is always Sunday.The day of the week the reeks of rest, but all we do is catch our breath,so we can wade naked in the bloody pool, and place our hand on the big, black book.To watch the knives zigzag between our aching fingers.A vacation is a countdown, T minus your life andcounting, time to drag your tongue across the sugar cube,and hope you get a taste.WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS FOR?WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON? SHUT UP!I can go on and on but lets move on, shall we?Say, your me, and I’m you, and they all watch the things we do,and like a smack of spite they threw me down the stairs,haven’t felt like this in years.The great magnet of malicious magnanimous refuse, let me go,and punch me into the dead spout again.That’s where you go when there’s no one else around,it’s just you, and there was never anyone to begin with, now was there?Sanctimonious pretentious dastardly bastards with their thumb on the pulse,and a finger on the trigger.CLASSIFIED MY ASS! THAT’S A FUCKING SECRET, AND YOU KNOW IT!Government is another way to say better…than…you.It’s like ice but no pick, a murder charge that won’t stick,it’s like a whole other world where you can smell the food,but you can’t touch the silverware.Huh, what luck. Fascism you can vote for.Humph, isn’t that sweet?And we’re all gonna die some day, because that’s the American way,and I’ve drunk too much, and said too little,when your gaffer taped in themiddle, say a prayer, say a face, get your self together and see what’s happening.SHUT UP! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!I’m sorry, I could go on and on buttheir times to move on so, remember: you’re a wreck, an accident.Forget the freak, your just nature.Keep the gun oiled, and the temple cleaned shit snort,and blaspheme, let the heads cool, and the engine run.Because in the end, everything we do, is just everything we’ve done.” - Stone Sour

39. “I would have had to kill him, and Death, you know, keeps secrets better even than a guilty Roman.” - Lew Wallace

40. “The number of family secrets is just staggering.” - Jill A. Davis

41. “There are two kinds of secrets. The ones we keep from others and the ones we keep from ourselves.” - Frank Warren

42. “People are secretive when they have secrets.” - Deb Caletti

43. “Sarah wonders if whatever secrets Grace is protecting feel the same as her own, sometimes just fuzzy and ticklish, like a littler of kittens trying to climb and paw their way out, and sometimes with claws bared, kittens grown to tigers, camouflaged but always ready to spring.” - Beth Neff

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

45. “Six weeks is a long time to wait, and a still longer time for a girl to keep a secret…” - Louisa May Alcott

46. “There are certain things in a man's past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind. I can put it even this way: the more decent a man is, the larger will the number of such things be.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

47. “To know a man’s secrets is to discover his weakness, and thus control his will” - Jeremy Aldana

48. “He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.” - Kristin Hannah

49. “My heart, for unknown reasons, seems to freeze in motion in my chest. I can see he senses it and he holds his pause to enjoy my suffering, prolonging my ignorance. “Viktor, what?” - Gwenn Wright

50. “He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.” - Anton Chekhov

51. “I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .” - Jennifer Haigh

52. “She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom.” - Kate Chopin

53. “You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.” - James Richardson

54. “We always hate people who surprise our secrets…” - L.M. Montgomery

55. “The value of secrets is ever fluctuating although ladies who have been in society for a long time learn that a secret kept can be worth more than a secret told.” - Anna Godbersen

56. “The Universe doesn't like secrets. It conspires to reveal the truth, to lead you to it.” - Lisa Unger

57. “[S]ecrets are like stars. They blaze inside the heart and ultimately could be explosive. But there are two types of secrets. Small secrets, like small stars, will eventually burn out. With time and space they lose their importance and simply vanish. No harm done. But big secrets, like massive stars, with time and constant fear grow stronger, creating a gravitational pull that eventually ... When they get so big, they become a black hole.” - Jennifer Jabaley

58. “Lies and secrets, Tessa, they are like a cancer in the soul. They eat away what is good and leave only destruction behind.” - Cassandra Clare

59. “Secrets are the kind of adventure she needs. Secrets are safe, and they do much to make you different. On the inside where it counts.” - E.L. Konigsburg

60. “There are so many movies like this, where you thought you were smarter than the screen but the director was smarter than you, of course he's the one, of course it was a dream, of course she's dead, of course, it's hidden right there, of course it's the truth and you in your seat have failed to notice in the dark.” - Daniel Handler

61. “If there's one thing I don't look for in a maid, it's discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.” - Julian Fellowes

62. “Women are better at keeping secrets, but men are more comfortable with them” - Stephen King

63. “The best secrets are the most twisted” - Sara Shepard

64. “Secrets. Everyone has them. The light of day and truth reveal some secrets to be nagging obsessions or habits, while other secrets may be as incriminating as a literal decaying skeleton in one’s closet.” - Kenn Bivins

65. “Secrets press inside a person. They press the way water presses at a dam. The secrets and the water, they both want to get out.” - Franny Billingsley

66. “Nothing weighs on us so heavily as a secret.” - Jean de La Fontaine

67. “There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.” - Alexandre Dumas

68. “Secrets and lies… Everyone in the world deals with these every day of their lives. To protect themselves. To protect someone else. It is all in the way that you look at the situation.” - Lacey Thorn

69. “It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.” - Catherynne M. Valente

70. “Some secrets are better left at that -as secrets.” - Candace Bushnell

71. “Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.” - Andre Malraux

72. “The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.” - Gregory Maguire

73. “I do not tell her about how much I look forward to going to the Wright barn. How those couple of hours in his studio feel like an escape, a refuge. Nor do I tell Rachel that I think Damian has the most beautiful hands I've ever seen, that he walks like a cat, that he has the clearest eyes, which seem able to see absolutely everything about me. That he seems to be the loneliest person I've ever met, and it breaks my heart. All of these things feel private. Precious. And I don't want to share them with Rachel. Not yet, anyway.” - Lisa Ann Sandell

74. “You are trying to lure us into revealing information you're not entitled to? With chocolate and wine? Are you amateurs?” - Moira J. Moore

75. “Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.” - J. Courtney Sullivan

76. “It is the one of the great secrets of life that those things are most worth doing,we do for others.” - Lewis Carroll

77. “The real secrets are not the ones I tell.” - Mason Cooley

78. “When you shine a bright light, a secret loses all its power.” - Tess Gerritsen

79. “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

80. “If you tell anyone what I just told you, I’ll call the Mob. I know some of them, you know.” “Bullshit.” I shrugged. “Believe what you want.” Finch eyed me suspiciously, and then smiled. “You are officially the coolest person I know.” “That’s sad, Finch. You should get out more,” I said, stopping at the cafeteria entrance.” - Jamie McGuire

81. “In an age of infinite digital documentation, paper was the last safe place for secrets.” - Evan Angler

82. “I'm scared, all right?" I said. I could feel my stomach churn as my gaze rested on the wooden trunk.Nathan turned my chin, looking at me with an expression of utter sincerity. "You don't have to be. I'm here.” - Markelle Grabo

83. “I couldn’t help but feel as if everyone had lied about everything. We all had secrets. We all had a dark side to our innocent cover. I wondered what we would be like, if we had been completely honest with each other in the first place. Maybe more people would be alive, but then again, more people could be dead.” - Shannon A Thompson

84. “Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom. How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them-amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister titles. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the "restricted" sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop.” - T.E.D. Klein

85. “I now understood that real secrets were lonely. They planted themselves inside of you and expanded, until you felt like that was all you were-a lonely little secret, isolated in your experiences.” - Yvonne Woon

86. “Sometimes, the biggest secrets you can only tell a stranger.” - Michelle Hodkin

87. “I walk out the door with a heavy feeling in my heart as another secret falls on top of it.” - Jessica Sorensen

88. “There are two good reasons to put your napkin in your lap. One is that food might spill in your lap, and it is better to stain the napkin than your clothing. The other is that it can serve as a perfect hiding place. Practically nobody is nosey enough to take the napkin off a lap to see what is hidden there.” - Lemony Snicket

89. “He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret.” - Dejan Stojanovic

90. “If only Uncle Monty knew what we know," Violet said, "and Stephano knew that he knew what we know. But Uncle Monty doesn't know what we know, and Stephano knows that he doesn't know what we know.""I know," Klause said."I know you know," Violet said” - Lemony Snicket

91. “The Tanakh teaches that, “The diligent will rule, while the lazy will be put to forced labor”. Most Jews work for themselves and hire employees instead of being employees.” - H.W. Charles

92. “Jews have been the most successful and productive nation in history.” - H.W. Charles

93. “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

94. “Keeping secrets isn't my specialty.” - Hannah Harrington

95. “The knowledge of secrets is a very enticing ship, a very tempting voyage, and one thinks that the highest attainment in life is to find out hidden truths, to seek out what is truth, to know what are all lies; to uncover, to discover and to rediscover, to dig up, to expose, to reveal... But secrets can go on forever, for an eternity! For as vast as the universe is, so are the secrets therein! And one can lose, because of that thought that in the secrets, everything is to be gained! But I can see, that all the knowledge of hidden things, all the knowledge in the universe, is not nearly as valuable and as worthy as the innocence of one's soul. And we are not directed unto good things through our ability to scavenge or to hunt or to decipher or to sail! Or to fly! But we are directed unto good things, through sovereign providence! He is more worthy- the innocent soul who has a simple faith in what he believes in- than the one who has found out all the dark secrets about what the other man has put his faith in! And it is far more profitable for a man to be healthy, to have a long, long life, loved ones that are blessed with these blessings all the same, much love and happiness and safety! It is far more profitable for a man to be able to remain innocent and have love and be healthy and to be able to watch his loved ones in good health and in good love, than for a man to uncover all the secrets of the universe! A single love, a single faith, a single trust, and one hope- these are far, far better things to aspire to have! And this– this is the biggest secret!” - C. JoyBell C.

96. “Yes, women have always had secrets and always will. I'm afraid men would be very distressed to learn what their darlings were thinking. Frankly, I don't think men are strong enough to bear the shock.” - Carol K. Carr

97. “History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.” - Heather Anastasiu

98. “What good is a secret if it remains a secret ... Secrets are meant to be discovered...” - Jocelyn Murray

99. “Las Vegas. Madhali umeona tunafanya nini katika maisha, fumba macho kwa kuyakodoa. Wanaosema hawajui wanaojua hawasemi. Siri ni siri milele. Kinachofanyika hapa hubakia hapa.” - Enock Maregesi

100. “And so the game went on in this manner, a throng of children playing keep-away from a bowling ball tossed back and forth between two plump ogres. The air filled with shrieks and cheers and shouts of laughter as daring players thrilled at the sport. That is, all but the few poor souls knocked flat and captured. No laughter rose from behind bars because those in the birdcage knew what was in store. They would soon be lunch for a couple of hungry ogres. Now you might be thinking—didn’t Gavin call it fun when he was swallowed by a wolf earlier? And didn’t he tell that raven-haired girl it doesn’t hurt to be swallowed whole by a bear? All true, all true. But here’s a secret you might not know. Ogres chew their food. Luckily, it’s only the first bite that stings.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

101. “I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” - Anais Nin

102. “Entre as recordações de cada pessoa, há coisas que ela não conta para qualquer um, somente para os amigos. Há também aquelas que ela não conta nem para os amigos, somente para sim mesma, e isso secretamente. Mas, finalmente, há também aquelas que o indivíduo tem medo de revelar até para si mesmo, e um homem respeitável tem tais coisas acumuladas em grande quantidade. E pode ser assim mesmo: quanto mais respeitável ele é, mais coisas desse tipo ele tem acumuladas. Eu, pelo menos, só recentemente tomei coragem para recordar algumas das minhas aventuras passadas, as quais até agora tinha evitado com uma certa inquietação. E agora, quando não só recordei, como até me decidi a escrevê-las, agora exatamente quero tirar a prova: é possível alguém ser inteiramente sincero consigo mesmo e não temer toda a verdade? A propósito: Heine afirma que é quase impossível existirem autobiografias sinceras, porque na certa o ser humano mentirá, falando de si mesmo. Na opinião dele, por exemplo, Rousseau sem dúvida mentiu sobre si mesmo em suas 'Confissões' e fez isso até deliberadamente, por vaidade. Estou convencido de que Heine está certo; entendo perfeitamente como, às vezes, alguém pode confessar uma série de crimes por pura vaidade e percebo até muito bem de que tipo pode ser essa vaidade.” - Fiodor Dostoievski

103. “That’s literally one of those things where if I tell you I have to kill you. A witch’s wand is a powerful tool and could be disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands.” - Amanda Kelly

104. “It turns out that when there is some conspicuous gap or contradiction at the center of someone's existence, there is probably a very specific, obvious reason for it, and the reason you're avoiding confronting it directly is that it's something you don't want to know.” - Tim Kreider

105. “What someone’s lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of someone’s self-image, their vanity and insecurities and most childish wishes, as we can infer from warped starlight the presence of a far vaster mass of dark matter.” - Tim Kreider

106. “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

107. “In a nutshell, the process they [abusers in a ritual abuse group] use on survivors is designed to:break the will and personality of the person until they become as nothing... with no will of their own...no identity...then they... rebuild the person & shape their will in order to...try and make the person one of them...thus gaining powerIf abusers hold all the power, becoming one of them can, for some, be the only means of survival. However, this doesn't always work, instead survivors often find ways of regaining their own power and fighting back.” - Laurie Matthew

108. “In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions.” - Laurie Matthew

109. “The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed.” - Judith Spencer

110. “For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those who enacted them. What they could not deny or disavow, they could distort. They could blame the victims, who deserved to die for fighting or crying or for failing to fight or cry. They found encouragement for such a stance in a general culture accustomed to blaming victims for their misfortunes, and in specific contact with child victims eager to blame themselves. By believing that victims had a choice when there was none, they could see victims as culpable. They could even see the deaths as right and purposeful in the nobility of sacrifice.” - Judith Spencer

111. “When I look in the mirror, I see a woman with secrets. When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.” - Terry Tempest Williams

112. “Reader: Dear Mr. Snicket, What is the best way to keep a secret? Lemony Snicket : Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you are kidding.” - Lemony Snicket

113. “But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.” - Margaret Atwood