secrets

The only place Aletta and I could be together unseen was just under the rafters in the church tower, a circumstance that propelled us into an earlier intimacy than what we would have known had we been permitted to walk together Sunday afternoons under the wide sky.

The Secret Revealer is the Righteous God.

Many millions of pregnancies__any if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child__ere each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.

There are thousands of codes in the Torah which are decoded by the Talmud.

If you tell anyone what I just told you, I__l call the Mob. I know some of them, you know._ __ullshit._ I shrugged. __elieve what you want._ Finch eyed me suspiciously, and then smiled. __ou are officially the coolest person I know._ __hat__ sad, Finch. You should get out more,_ I said, stopping at the cafeteria entrance.

...how time packs new years over the old ones but how those old years are still in there, like the earliest, tightest rings centering a tree, the most hidden, enclosed in darkness and shielded from weather. But then a saw screams in and the tree topples and the circles are stricken by the sun and the sap glistens and the stump is laid open for the world to see.

They didn't just live with secrets. Secrecy surrounded their entire lives.

Many more villagers, who have seen an elephant for the first time in their lives, give absurd exaggerations regarding his size, weight, and height. One of them describes him as __ fundament!_. Another, elaborating, alludes to the term __irmament,_ because of the elephant__ hugeness. He felt as though the sky was obliterated from his vision. The last to be interviewed by the local TV station swears that he sensed the world lean forward as the elephant came closer and tilt backwards as the beast walked away.This large mammal ambles purposefully. He pays no heed to the crowded silence following him in stealthy consciousness. One of the villagers, a woman often suspected of dabbling in witchcraft, talks of her inspired theory: that this was no elephant, more like a human on a holy mission of avenging justice. Two other witnesses, neither having had any contact with the woman, speak in substantiation of the woman__ claims, giving as evidence the observation that the elephant turned around when someone said something in Somali. Several villagers will not comment, afraid of a fitting retribution should they do so.

If only Uncle Monty knew what we know," Violet said, "and Stephano knew that he knew what we know. But Uncle Monty doesn't know what we know, and Stephano knows that he doesn't know what we know.""I know," Klause said."I know you know," Violet said

This would be a secret that I would carry with me, until the day I died.

My name is Cammie!_ I didn__ think about all the people I could have woken, all the alarms that might have gone off. I just snapped, __ow did you know about Boston? Why are you working with Mr. Solomon now? Are you my friend or are you my enemy, Zach? Or, wait, let me guess, you can__ tell me.

I hope to turn my reader into the quiet person in the corner who, even when no one is telling them anything, sees everything.

What good is a secret if it remains a secret ... Secrets are meant to be discovered...

It's in the anomalies that nature reveals its secrets.

What are we going to do, Ayden?" she whispered, glaring up at me."I don't know," I confessed. "But how about we burn that bridge when we get there?""I thought it was 'cross' that bridge?"I lightly poked her in the eye and she laughed. "No. We're burning bridges. Crossing is so overrated." I smiled and touched the corner of her eyes, captivated by the iridescent blues."I think I like the sound of that," she whispered."Yeah?""Yeah.

We carry secrets under our skin like shrapnel. Our surface wounds heal, but the damage festers underneath while we worry what tiny pieces will work their way to the surface for the world to see.

A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.

I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they won't stink.I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken--a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: to be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I'd be like them.