SECRETS

'....secrets are potent things. We may think we are honoring someone by telling him our secret. But the knowledge of it may fester in him and turn to poison. Maybe only God can absorb deep human secrets without internal damage.' 

Cornelius Plantinga Jr, Reading for Preaching, p.76. 

SECRETS

'I had always made it a rule of thumb that there were no real secrets in Port William, but now I knew that this was not so. It was the secrets between people that got out. The secrets that people knew alone were the ones that were kept, the knowledge too painful or too dear to speak of. If so urging a thing as I now knew was known only to me, then what must other people know that they had never told? I felt a strange new respect for the heads I barbered. I knew that the dead carried with them out of this world things that they could not give away.' 

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, p.192. 

SECRETS

'Secrets! As a child you come to see the world's crisscrossed with them like electromagnetic waves, maybe even held together by them. But you can't know. Not, as kids, say for sure. And if you blunder by accident into a secret it's like you've pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you're brave or reckless enough you can even step inside - taking a chance that what you'll learn is worth what it costs.'

Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys, p.94.