And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret–the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway–that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies. Sue Miller
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having... - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  2. Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love. - George R.r. Martin

  3. Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is. - Vladimir Nabokov

  4. All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. - Woody Allen

  5. A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent. - William Blake

More Quotes By Sue Miller
  1. ...the words make our silences easier--they're the current that runs under them.

  2. But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that’s dear to...

  3. It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please....for...others it seems there must be a person...

  4. And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised exactly between the things in life you want to do...

  5. This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.

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