Top 85 Secret History Quotes
#1. I really like all of the characters in 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt, especially Camilla, the one girl. I find her fascinating.
Hannah Murray
#2. I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."
Donna Tartt
#4. I collect old first and second World War artifacts and things. I'm a little secret history nerd. I've been lucky enough to do quite a few war movies too so I've taken little things off each film.
Jeremy Irvine
#5. It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.
Edmund De Waal
#7. There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
Honore De Balzac
#8. Kane pulled a key from a piece of thread around his neck that looked just like the skeleton key Gerald had given Peter the night before, and slid it into the keyhole. "Welcome," said Kane dramatically, as he pushed the doors open, "to the complete and secret history of the Watchers.
C.A. Gray
#9. About the Author Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages.
Anonymous
#10. If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#11. If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
William Makepeace Thackeray
#12. This, then, is how we first came across the fearsome secret history of turkey's mannequins.
Orhan Pamuk
#13. A secret history of the US Government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a safe haven in the US for Nazis and their collaborators after WW2 and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
James Morcan
#15. But in the secret history of anger
one man's silence / lives in the bodies of others.
Ilya Kaminsky
#17. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260
Donna Tartt
#18. As every one is pleased with imagining that he knows something not yet commonly divulged, secret history easily gains credit; but it is for the most part believed only while it circulates in whispers, and when once it is openly told, is openly refuted.
Samuel Johnson
#19. My secret heroes were Joe Morello, Ray Charles - who is, in my opinion, the most dominant figure in musical history in the 21st century - and Frank Sinatra. Those are my heroes. And as a writer, when Bob Dylan came along, it was a miracle because he gave us all permission to say anything!
J. D. Souther
#20. Tremble had a secret. Underneath his dreary exterior, he was quite interesting. When his penchant for investigating the area's past was indulged, a light shown in his eyes and he became almost passionate, which is why his wife kept a stack of local history books on her bedside table.
Christopher Fowler
#21. I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.
Donna Tartt
#22. In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?
Donna Tartt
#23. He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.
Dava Sobel
#24. Beneath the broad tides of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depth the changes that take place upon the surface.
A. E. Waite
#25. Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships' engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided. "George!
John Le Carre
#26. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#27. I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.
Donna Tartt
#28. The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.
George Eliot
#29. the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all - and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared.
Rosa Brooks
#30. If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.
Honore De Balzac
#31. He pursed his lips and gazed at me reproachfully for throwing our seventh-grade history in his face,times two. back then he'd brought our tween-love Armageddon on himself by letting our whole class in on a secret while he kept me in the dark.
Not that i was bitter.
Jennifer Echols
#32. It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars.
Donna Tartt
#33. Ultimately there's a dirty secret about the Internet, which is nothing disappears. All these companies have all your information. They have your search history.
Ashton Kutcher
#34. There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.
Donna Tartt
#36. The secret is to create the condition for change, a process that sometimes takes decades, and then use certain men as pivot points, a fulcrum to move history.
Robert Ferrigno
#37. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.
Donna Tartt
#38. Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
Donna Tartt
#39. Just because it's the biggest secret in the history of the world doesn't make it any less true.
Gina Damico
#40. I loved history, any kind of history, and even better if it was hidden, secret, or underground.
April White
#41. Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.
Donna Tartt
#42. But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal - to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.
Donna Tartt
#43. Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.
Will Durant
#44. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
Donna Tartt
#45. I'm suggesting that, ironically, the secret to becoming a world 'hyperpower' is tolerance. If you look at history, you see great powers being very tolerant in their rise to global dominance.
Amy Chua
#46. We know people by their stories: their history, their habits, their secrets, their triumphs and failures. We know them by what they do. We want to know mountains too, but they've got no story. So we do the next best thing. We throw ourselves onto them and make the stories happen.
Bruce Barcott
#47. The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.
Donna Tartt
#48. You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony - who tells the last story.
Tad Williams
#49. This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.
Boris Pasternak
#50. I am the first model in the history of Victoria's Secret shows who walked the show wearing her TWA. Hence, I felt very special when I actually got the request to walk the show wearing my TWA.
Maria Borges
#51. More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
John Barth
#52. History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
John Le Carre
#53. One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
Orhan Pamuk
#54. One way or another, no matter which theory of our journey is correct, it's myself I address; to whom I rehearse as to a stranger our history and condition, and will disclose my secret hope though I sink for it.
John Barth
#55. What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [ ... ] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.
Camille Paglia
#56. Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and moods without attempting to pry into each other's history.
Thomas Hardy
#57. I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.
Donna Tartt
#58. For the miserable find comfort in the philosophy that not on them alone has evil fallen.
Procopius
#59. One of history's secrets is that the revolutionaries appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew.
Christopher Caldwell
#60. Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
#61. It's quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will ...
Vladimir Odoevsky
#62. Susan Straight finds LA's secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.
Walter Mosley
#63. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
William Poundstone
#64. The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film - whether it's history, psychology, economics, or architecture - so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn't going to help you unless you have something to say.
George Lucas
#65. In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party
Donna Tartt
#66. But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
Donna Tartt
#67. Secret Societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history ... It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence.
Manly Hall
#68. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#69. Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
Donna Tartt
#70. The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology.
Helena Blavatsky
#71. One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity.
James Buchan
#72. The writing of history is largely a diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.
Frank Herbert
#73. I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life.
Donna Tartt
#74. The second covered the history of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, based on a top secret 2009 internal report from the NSA's inspector general; another detailed the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program that I had read about on the plane;
Glenn Greenwald
#75. Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist.
Donna Tartt
#76. 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
#77. Every milestone in the history of the company, even when forecast with heaps of hoopla, was ultimately played out according to some secret timeline of geologic tedium, so that it was drained of all interest and drama well before it took place and afterward went all but unnoticed.
Thomas Ligotti
#78. In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.
Donna Tartt
#79. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her.
Patrick Modiano
#80. For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.
Alan Furst
#81. The ink was secret nectar, for Marin isn't married.
Jessie Burton
#82. So it was like that now, catastrophe inevitable at the most empty moments. Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret, guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.
Maggie Helwig
#83. We weather the vagaries of history, welcoming new rulers and bending knees to those in power, whoever they may be. We are a tool of the nation, an asset of the British Isles. Those who work within the Checquy can accomplish what no one else can, and so they are the secret arm of the kingdom.
Daniel O'Malley
#84. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#85. The Book of Telling tells of a woman's journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process, an unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
Alan Lightman
