“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”
― The Blind Assassin
― The Blind Assassin
“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”
― The Blind Assassin
― The Blind Assassin
“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
― Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
― Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
“A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.”
― The Shadow of the Wind
― The Shadow of the Wind
Heather’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Heather’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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