Caroline B. Cooney Quotes

Don't read my diary when I'm gone.

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.

I think - I think - I think how little they think what lies so near them.

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

People hide the truth because they're afraid.

If you knew how important you are, you would fragment into a billion pieces and just be light.

You matter as much as the things that matter to you do.

Hold to a thing long enough, a secret, a desire, maybe a lie, and it will shape you.

Just because you didn't speak the facts out loud didn't erase their existence. Silence was just a quieter way to lie.

Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.

Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else." Then let's be quiet together.

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.

A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.

The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird.

She turned to Frizz. "So you understand the problem? You can't let Tally know about Radical Honesty. There's no telling what she'll do if she finds out you could ruin her plans." Frizz's eyebrows rose. "So let me get this straight, Aya-chan. You want me, a person who can't lie, to lie about the fact that I can't lie?" "We need another plan," Hiro said.

A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.

Truth can remain silent. Lies must be spoken.

I don't think you're weak," Jared said. "I want to guard you because you are important to me. Because you are - God, this is going to sound so stupid, I can never think of a way to say it - you are precious. I can never think of how to describe the value you have to me, because all the words for value suggest that you belong to me, and you don't.

A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it.

What comes into the world to disturb nothing merits neither attention nor patience

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

One bush, they say, can never hide two thieves.