Top 32 The Secret History Best Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The ink was secret nectar, for Marin isn't married.
Jessie Burton
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. This, then, is how we first came across the fearsome secret history of turkey's mannequins.
Orhan Pamuk
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. For the miserable find comfort in the philosophy that not on them alone has evil fallen.
Procopius
#20. But in the secret history of anger
one man's silence / lives in the bodies of others.
Ilya Kaminsky
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -The Secret History, pg. 260
Donna Tartt
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
