“For years, we'd been the thorn of the neighborhood, the dirty little secret that wasn't so secret. The girls who just wouldn't settle.”
“We're nobody's dirty little secret.”
“The fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture.”
“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.”
“For it wasn't the secret--the secret that wasn't a secret anyway--that led to 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.”
“I don’t know why I feel so compelled to tell Olivia all my dirty little secrets, but I do”