The Secrets We Kept Quotes

“We unveil ourselves in the pieces we want others to know, even those closest to us. We all have our secrets.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for,”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“I wanted them to take a good hard look at a system that had allowed the State to kill off any writer, any intellectual—hell, even any meteorologist—they disagreed with.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“Dostoyevsky threw me a rope in the fog and began to tug. When he wrote that “the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for,”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“His words felt like running a hand under cold water after burning it on the stove. The pain might be smoothed while the water runs, but as soon as you turn off the faucet, the throbbing continues.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“The funny thing was, I never thought of myself as a spy. Surely the craft took more than smiling and laughing at stupid jokes and pretending to be interested in everything these men said. There wasn't a name for it back then, but it was at that first party that I became a Swallow: a woman who uses her God-given talents to gain information - talents I'd been accumulating since puberty, had refined in my twenties, and then perfected in my thirties. These men thought they were using me, but it was always the reverse; my power was making them think it wasn't.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“One might think this scenario plays out only in high school or college, but the politics of friendship are tricky at every age.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“This is not the letter you’ve long sought. This is not about the book. This is not the confession that would prove the crimes you’ve assigned to me. Nor is it a plea for my innocence. I am innocent of what I’ve been accused of, but not of everything.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“Maybe certain poems are meant only for oneself.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“This book will take us down a spiral from which there will be no return.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“If you were to come to Headquarters and see a woman in a smart green tweed suit following a man into his office or a woman wearing red heels and a matching angora sweater at reception, you might've assumed these women were typists or secretaries; and you would've been right. But you would have also been wrong. Secretary: a person entrusted with a secret. From the Latin secretus, secretum. We all typed, but some of us did more. We spoke no word of the work we did after we covered our typewriters each day. Unlike some of the men, we could keep our secrets.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“one can sum up the entire spectrum of human motivations with a formula called MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“But my favorite part has always been the space between when the lights go down and the film begins to flicker—that brief moment when the whole world feels like it’s on the verge of something.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“I had some talent, but not as much as I would have liked. Isn’t that always the case with such things? One’s passion almost always outweighs talent.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“The trick to pinpointing the man with the biggest bank account in the room is not to look to the man in the nicest tux, but to the man not trying to impress.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“it requires constant reassurance from others, and when that assurance doesn’t come, you falter. And when you falter, you go after the lowest-hanging fruit—someone to make you feel wanted and powerful.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“May our literary weapon of mass destruction make the monster squeal.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“All men, all women, for that matter, secretly long for some great tragedy. It sharpens the lived experience. Makes for more interesting people.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“As it is, my story no longer belongs to me. In the collective imagination, I have become someone else—a heroine, a character. I have become Lara.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“And as the years passed, her age always stayed the same, her beauty sealed in amber.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“Even after I met a nurse in Detroit who opened doors inside me I hadn’t known I’d locked. Even then, I’d still see Sally sipping coffee at a diner counter, or sticking her arm out of a dressing room for another size, or in the balcony at a movie theater watching a picture by herself. And each time, I’d feel that same inner gasp, that exquisite anticipation—that moment the lights go down and the film begins, that moment when, for just a few seconds, the whole world feels on the verge of awakening.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“Only privileged men romanticize tragedy”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“Reading the letter, I felt something I think only the nuns of the camp could understand—the warmth and protection of faith.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“I’d also compose poems of my own, the lines appearing in my head as they would on paper. I’d say them to myself again and again until they were cemented. But for some reason I cannot recite them now, when I have the paper to write them down. Maybe certain poems are meant only for oneself.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“I have this one sharpened pencil. It is smaller than my thumb, and my wrist already aches. But I will write until it wears down and turns to dust.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“The way he pushed himself to write his great work no matter the cost.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“He wished he could go back to the days when the novel first came to him, when it was still pouring from some untapped pool inside him. It had felt like finding a new lover- the obsession, the infatuation, his thoughts on nothing else, his characters infiltrating his dreams, his heart weightless with every new discovery, every sentence, ever scene. At times, Boris has felt it was the only thing keeping him alive”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“His words felt like running a hand under cold water after burning it on the stove—the pain might be soothed while the water runs, but as soon as you turn off the faucet, the throbbing continues.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“But the plan of action is determined, And the end irrevocably sealed. I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood: Life is not a walk across a field.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept

“Plus, I got a small thrill from standing so close to the ride featured in one of my favorite movies, The Third Man.”
― Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept