Hidden Past Quotes

I was a go-go dancer, too. I called myself 'Grace Mendoza' to fool my parents.

I used to do drugs, but don't tell anyone or it will ruin my image.

I'm always leery about bumping into somebody. One time I was with my wife in a restaurant, I saw somebody from my undercover days, and I got up and we just walked out.

I had dreams in 2000 of being an Olympian for boxing. I never talk about it.

I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just... interested.

I knew I was born at the North but hoped nobody would find it out. I looked upon the misfortune as something so shrouded by time and distance that maybe nobody remembered it.

My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.

Many Americans have a traitor lurking somewhere in their family tree.

The only thing I don't divulge is the truth about Mother killing little Carolina. I don't know why. Perhaps I sense he's not ready to know that just yet. Maybe he never will. People can live with only so much honesty. And sometimes, people can suprise you. I talk to my brother as I never have before, trusting in him, letting the river listen to my confessions on its path toward the sea. ~pg 693

When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.

Once, she made a boy come out of his house and kiss her under the streetlight. It was her first kiss. She thinks it was probably his, too. She never told him and she never, ever will.

Know what you did last summer, so I started hookin'

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

My sense is that we are missing a huge part of the human story. I think it's possible, indeed probable, that we are a species with amnesia; that we've lost the record of our story going back thousands of years before so-called history began, and I think that if we could go back to that dark epoch, we would discover many astounding things about ourselves.

My brother's researched our early family history. He found a letter from a fella who said he used to be in love with my mum.

Very few know that I was a complete wild child.

All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets.

Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal.

When someone has spent a lifetime trying to survive a death sentence, the last thing you want is your children uncovering what you have been at such pains to conceal.

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.

Behind every citizen lies a graveyard.

Anyone who's lived their life to the fullest extent has a scandal buried somewhere.

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.

We have history, you and I. You just don’t know it yet.

I'd say, for my freshman year in college, I was doing everything in my power to hide the fact that I had ever had any association with the Paul Green School of Rock Music because it was like this bruise. It was such a sore subject.