Quotes from The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

Eva Rice ·  368 pages

Rating: (6.3K votes)


“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


About the author

Eva Rice
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“He pauses. “Maybe that letter was left for you.”

“No, she was pretty pissed that I wrote back.”

Now he hesitates. “I don’t mean that she left the letter for you.”

It takes me a second to figure out his tone. “Rev, if you start preaching at me, I’m going in the house.”

“I’m not preaching.”

No, he’s not. Yet.

He still has that old Bible I found him clutching in my closet. It was his mother’s. He’s read it about twenty times. He’ll debate theology with anyone who’s interested—and I’m not on that list. Geoff and Kristin used to take him to church, but he said he didn’t like that he couldn’t live by his own interpretation.

What he didn’t say was that looking up at a man in a pulpit reminded him too much of his father.

Rev doesn’t walk around quoting Bible verses or anything—usually—but his faith is rock solid. I once asked him how he can believe in a providential god when he barely survived living with his father.

He looked at me and said, “Because I did survive.”

And there’s no arguing that.”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost


“We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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