“But I'm no hero. I had to keep my dirty little secret. The worst sin I committed was holding it in; letting the secret blacken me.”

“When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. I had a secret. It was a guilty secret, certainly. But it was MY secret. I had something to hold on to. It was company. It kept me calm. It filled me up and emptied me out.”

“...there are no secrets unless you keep them to yourself, and this was the greatest secret I had ever had to keep in my life so far.”

“I don’t know why I feel so compelled to tell Olivia all my dirty little secrets, but I do”

“So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original "intention" had have been.”

“We're nobody's dirty little secret.”