Quotes from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“Like all intelligent people, she functions very well in extreme disorder.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“Mama was amazing like that; I spent most of my teenage years assuming that she knew nothing about me, and all of my twenties realizing that she knew everything.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“There's never any warning that something extraordinary is about to happen, is there?”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“If I could take people out of their heads for a little while, if I could give them a dose of fantasy, that was all that mattered. You can't put a price on escape.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“Would it ever, ever leave? I had become used to the ache now; it was with me all the time, and never seemed to lessen. Time was no healer, I decided, but it was a great accommodator.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“As he started 'Whisky and Gin' and the cheering and the shrieking filled my senses, I thought of Mama, shattered by the war and Papa's death and I wished with all my heart that she could understand how it felt to be us that night - how it felt to be eighteen and unbeaten, eighteen and alive.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

“The odd thing about Mama was that she liked to think of herself as a doomy sort of person, but there was a natural optimism in her that refused to be defeated, however hard she squashed it down, and I know that she never lost faith completely.”
― Eva Rice, quote from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

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“There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair. It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! ‘What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty thousand living in a town, there is not one who would cry out, who would give vent to his indignation aloud. We see the people going to market for provisions, eating by day, sleeping by night, talking their silly nonsense, getting married, growing old, serenely escorting their dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes... Everything is quiet and peaceful, and nothing protests but mute statistics: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition... And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree—and all goes well.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from Stories

“Seventy-four suspended lashes for having tea with your friend!” she said, with as much hatred as I’d ever heard in her voice. “What do they expect young people to do? Pray and say ‘Death to America’ all day?” She looked at my father. “Mazi should really leave this country next year.”
― Maziar Bahari, quote from Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival

“I thought loving someone meant letting go, but by the time I learned that loving someone means fighting for them too, it was too late.”
― Renee Carlino, quote from Swear on This Life

“Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?”
― Mark Twain, quote from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“As Darice skimmed the bodies and he noted their number, he duplicated Sumi’s earlier gape. “Gah, Dancer … You took them all out without even breathing hard. How?” Bracing his forearm on his bent knee, Hauk gave his nephew an irritated smirk. “What do you think I do for a living, boy? Bake fucking cookies?” He holstered his newly found weapons and continued to search bodies.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Born of Fury

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