“I had a secret that I was bound to protect but a secret that i was not to share. A secert that suddenly he knew all about.”

“We are bound by the secrets we share.”

“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. ”

“And while I tell him all my thoughts, I don't always share my secrets.”

“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.”

“Somehow I knew that no matter what I chose to tell or to keep secret, he would understand.”