Concealment Quotes

Suddenly a dog burst from the concealment of the trees, its shaggy wheaten coat gleaming warmly in the sun. He was a medium-sized mix of no particular breed, part hound, possibly, or maybe retriever. He seemed well fed, so it was doubtful that he was a stray. Then again, mayhap he was skilled at poaching birds and rabbits from the bountiful reserves of game in the area. ~ Tracy Anne Warren

The very falsehood that stained her, was a proof how blindly she loved another
this dark, slight, elegant, handsome man
while he himself was rough, and stern, and strongly made. He lashed himself into an agony of fierce jealousy. He thought of that look, that attitude!
how he would have laid his life at her feet for such tender glances, such fond detention! He mocked at himself, for having valued the mechanical way in which she had protected him from the fury of the mob; now he had seen how soft and bewitching she looked when with a man she really loved. He remembered, point by point, the sharpness of her words
'There was not a man in all that crowd for whom she would not have done as much, far more readily than for him.' He shared with the mob, in her desire of averting bloodshed from them; but this man, this hidden lover, shared with nobody; he had looks, words, hand-cleavings, lies, concealment, all to himself. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

If there is a god, he is not only a wizard at leaving clues behind. More than anything, he's a master of concealment. And the world is not something that gives itself away. The heavens still keep their secrets. There is little gossip amongst the stars. But no one has forgotten the Big Bang yet. Since then, silence has reigned supreme, and every thing there is moving away. One can still come across a moon. Or a comet. Just don't expect friendly greetings. No visiting cards are printed in space. ~ Jostein Gaarder

These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger - when I found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile - when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders - even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt. ~ Charlotte Bronte

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. ~ George Eliot

The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realize that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world. ~ Nick Cave

Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account of that which conceals it. The good is least good whilst it is thus concealed. The concealment must be removed so that the good may be able freely to appear in its own brightness. For example, the mountain, the sand, the earth, or the stone in which a metal has grown is such a concealment. Each one of the visible metals is a concealment of the other six metals. ~ Paracelsus Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim

In order to write a memoir, I've sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I've waited - sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair - for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I've been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings - that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it - are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters ~ Dani Shapiro

The end, the last, the limit, that at which something stops, that whereby something is restricted to what it is. Restriction as enclosure in the current appearance. Restriction as highest and fulfilled exerting force. Restriction in the Greek sense as confinement within boundaries, ones which simultaneously merely let the restricted thing be seen and also delimit it against other ones, and - conceal it in its belongingness to them. Restriction a sort of concealment, especially if seen in terms of the pure presence of that which comes to presence, rather than in terms of the respective "this" in its individuation. ~ Martin Heidegger

Just as some people may conceal their own sinfulness thus seeming better than the norm, others expose their own sinfulness thus seeming worse than the norm. ~ Criss Jami

Real bullets are for keeps, and concealment is not necessarily good cover. ~ Dick Couch

The snow, the effect of concealment and secrecy it creates, makes him think of the brutality of the wartime legislation to forbid and violently extract secrets. It is as if the hushed white landscape is showing how sacrosanct are our secrets, how much of our vitality is bound up in them. ~ Glenn Haybittle

The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays. ~ Peter Watts

Someone who lies for you will also lie to you. The occasional benefit your business may gain from a successful deception or concealment is always outweighed by the encouragement it provides to those willing to risk trust for success. ~ Michael Josephson

Radar Data #12

It was in the absence of light
as when near new moon and
no moonlight; as when a part

of a picture is in shadow (as
opposed to a light); as when
in the condition of being

hidden from view, obscure,
or unknown - in concealment,
or else without knowledge

as regards to some particular;
and of the weather, season,
air, sky, sea, etc., characterized

by tempest; in times, events,
circumstances etc. subject to
tempers; inflamed, indicative,

predictive, or symbolical of
strife (harbinger of coming
trouble) - a period of darkness

occurring between one day &
the next during which a place
receives no light from the sun,

and what if it is all behind us?
I no longer fear the rain will
never end, but doubt our ability

to return to what lies passed.
On the radar, a photopresent
scraggle of interference, as if

the data is trying to pretend
something's out there where
everything is lost. ~ Lytton Smith

My Christian brethren, if the crowd of difficulties which stand between your souls and God succeed in keeping you away, all is lost. Right into the Presence you must force your way, with no concealment, baring the soul with all its ailments before Him, asking, not the arrest of the consequences of sin, but the cleansing of the conscience " from dead works to serve the living God," so that if you must suffer, you will suffer as a forgiven man. ~ Frederick William Robertson

There must be no concealment," she said. "Alas! We have had too much already. And besides there is nothing in all the world that can give me more pain than I have already endured, than I suffer now! ~ Bram Stoker

This civil action is another case of a tragedy that has become all too familiar in the music industry: a business manager and professional advisers exploit an immensely talented artist's loyalty and trust through greed, self-dealing, concealment, knowing misrepresentation and reckless disregard for professional fiduciary duties. ~ Leonard Cohen

It is a good thing she is on our side, is it not?"
Noah started, turning to confront the Demon who had appeared at his back with flawless silence and concealment.
"Jacob! You just took ten years off my life," Noah hissed.
"Only ten? I must be losing my touch." Jacob looked from Noah to the last place Legna had been standing. He nodded his head in her former direction. "What was that all about?"
"I have no idea, but I am beginning to feel like I am the only one who does not know what the hell is happening in his own damn house."
"Sorry state of affairs, seeing as how you are King and all," Jacob said, his lips twitching with amusement as Noah glared at him. "That is only my opinion, though. Perhaps I will ask my troublemaking wife for hers."
Noah had the grace to openly wince.
"You heard that, hmm?"
"And therefore . . ." Jacob prompted.
"She heard it, too," Noah concluded with comical pain. "Forgive me, Bella. I think I am just in a foul mood."
"She says she will forgive you as soon as she needs a babysitter."
"You know, I think you better go out there and enforce some of my laws before I begin to think of how many ways I can set your ass on fire," the King said meanly, the glare of his gaze all business.
"I would, but I am in need of Gideon. Where is he?"
"How should I know?" Noah asked grumpily, moving to the fire and sinking down into the only thing in the room that wasn't giving him grief: his favorite chair. ~ Jacquelyn Frank

Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy - that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

You always know the creative because it is revealed openly. Concealment betrays the existence of another force entirely. ~ Frank Herbert

This man had something to hide, some shame in his past, and those with a past can always be bought. ~ Ian Rankin

If you mean Charles Stuart,' Frances's voice rang out clearly in the hall, 'then calling him "he of whom you were speaking" is hardly a brilliant disguise. And if that is your idea of deep concealment then I don't anticipate great success, on the day of which you have spoken, or any other day, actually. ~ Philippa Gregory

After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are the moving impulses of our life. But it is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. ~ Calvin Coolidge

A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. ~ Martin Heidegger

To our three levels of complicating alienation we must add the fundamental distinction or break between God and humankind, between Creator and creature. That "division" is no tragedy, but part and parcel of our identity and God's grandeur. It must be accounted for in the mystery of God, who reveals himself to us as we can bear it: revelation invariably involves concealment, since God is God and we are not. The communion that he forges with us remains a tantalizing "mystery" that leads us to know more and more of him, but never in completion - and at this, we wonder! As Kallistos Ware puts it, where knowledge of God is concerned, "The eyes are closed - but they are also opened" (The Orthodox Way, p. 15). ~ Edith M. Humphrey

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. ~ Thomas Carlyle

We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment. ~ Arthur Miller

Women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned observingly in their direction. ~ Virginia Woolf

Above all I am hoping for trees, which may afford me some means of concealment and food and shelter. Often there are trees because barren landscapes are dull and the Games resolve too quickly without them. ~ Suzanne Collins

Concealment is equated, unknowingly to ourselves, with individuality; the more we conceal the more it seems we are asserting our very personality, resisting a somewhat repellent, unwelcome intrusion of other things into ourselves. ~ Eli Siegel

This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls, she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates, outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them. Worldly ~ Charles Dickens

I stumble across the sea of tarmac, finding pavement, concealment and a brick wall. Palms brace against the scrubby surface. My stomach churns and then bubbles over, burning my throat as acrid yellow acid spills from my lips in frothy discomposure. It splatters the pavement like a spray of blood. ~ Rebecca Clare Smith

The last god has his own most unique uniqueness and stands outside of the calculative determination expressed in the labels "mono-theism," "pan-theism," and "a-theism." There has been "monotheism," and every other sort of "theism," only since the emergence of Judeo-Christian "apologetics," whose thinking presupposes "metaphysics." With the death of this God, all theisms wither away. The multiplicity of gods is not subject to enumeration but, instead, to the inner richness of the grounds and abysses in the site of the moment for the lighting up and concealment of the intimation of the last god. ~ Martin Heidegger

Insofar as it represents a genuine reconciliation of differences, a consensus is a fine thing; insofar as it represents a concealment of differences, it is a miscarriage of democratic procedure. ~ J. William Fulbright

For a wrongdoer to be undetected is difficult; and for him to have confidence that his concealment will continue is impossible. ~ Epicurus

Lying is a deliberate choice to mislead a target without giving any notification of the intent to do so. There are two major forms of lying: concealment, leaving out true information; and falsification, or presenting false information as if it were true. ~ Paul Ekman

Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment. ~ Wendell Phillips

There is no virtue in concealment. When the earth is rendered chaos, regulations of speech and propriety are rendered impotent, just as city may become desolate, and street, battle ground, and flesh may become fire. ~ M T Anderson

As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth. ~ Richard Posner

Time itself is only as real as your own mental discrimination between the revelation and concealment of the one Light. ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment
that explodes in poetry. ~ Adrienne Rich

The concealment of art by the actor is as great a mark of genius as it is in the painter. ~ Francois Delsarte

The power of uncovering India's biggest concealment is in your hands. ~ Sambhav Ratnakar

So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large? ~ Olivia Laing

Jesus was not a whisperer. No one ever saw Him close to His neighbor's ear, looking stealthily around lest some one should overhear what He was going to say. He stood upright, looked men squarely and kindly in the eye, and spoke what He had to say right out, boldly, frankly, that the whole world might hear; and when He did speak privately to His disciples, He told them to shout it from the housetops. 'Truth fears nothing but concealment,' said an old Church Father, and Jesus spake only the truth. ~ Samuel Logan Brengle

A young woman in love always looks like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief. ~ Jane Austen

Concealment is the foe of tranquility. ~ Fanny Burney

Approach him across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts. ~ J.A. Baker

So much of my life has been about self-effacement, pretense, masquerading, concealment, and indirection. ~ Marlon Riggs

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment. ~ Virgil

When I went back to Iraq again, after the liberation was complete, I was myself engaged on a sort of "dig", and I decided to travel with Paul Wolfowitz. It was in its own way an archaeological and anthropological expedition. Here are some of the things we unearthed or observed. Unnoticed by almost everybody, and unreported by most newspapers, Saddam Hussein's former chief physicist Dr. Mahdi Obeidi had waited until a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad to accost some American soldiers and invite them to excavate his back garden. There he showed them the components of a gas centrifuge
the crown jewels of uranium enrichment
along with a two-foot stack of blueprints. This burial had originally been ordered by Saddam's younger son Qusay, who had himself been in charge of the Ministry of Concealment, and had outlasted many visits by "inspectors". I myself rather doubt that Hans Blix would ever have found the trove on his own. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Later, concealment of pride in humility came to be recognized as a deliberate and useful tactic which Sophia - renamed Catherine - used when confronting crisis and danger. Threatened, she drew around herself a cloak of meekness, deference, and temporary submission. ~ Robert K. Massie

If one considers how much reason every person has for anxiety and timid self-concealment, and how three-quarters of his energy and goodwill can be paralyzed and made unfruitful by it, one has to be very grateful to fashion ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The proposition that primitive dream imagery might reproduce, albeit imperfectly, the experience of one's ancestors, including their terrors, was rather too existentially charged for post-modern sensitivities, for which the meaningless hypothesis of memory de-junking was much more appealing. Even worse, the notion that one's own ideation, one's own monsters, or indeed oneself as a monster, might be transmitted forward to future generations threatened deeply assumptions about the privacy of the mind and an individual's discretionary power of inviolable concealment over unedifying thoughts. ~ Robert Edeson

The great strength of our Order lies in its concealment; let it never appear in any place in its own name but always covered by another name and another occupation. None is fitter than the three lower degrees of Freemasonry; the public is accustomed to it, expects little from it and therefore takes little notice of it. ~ Adam Weishaupt

Just as art is the concealment of art, laissezfaire is the concealment of tremendous generosity. ~ Leonard Cohen

When we encounter unexpected obstacles in finding out something which we wish to know, there are two possible courses to take. It may be that the right course is to treat the obstacle as a spur to further efforts; but there is a second possibility - that we have been trying to find something which does not exist. You will remember that that was how the relativity theory accounted for the apparent concealment of our velocity through the aether. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of like to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? Oh, reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts
this whispering "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience. ~ Anne Bronte

A blank, my lord. She never told her love, 110 But let concealment, like a worm i'the bud, Feed on her damask cheek. ~ William Shakespeare

But at the first word or sign from anyone you will drop whatever you are doing and ready yourself for what is really your one and only duty: to lend yourself. Your hands are not your own, nor are your breasts, nor, most especially, any of your bodily orifices, which we may explore or penetrate at will. You will remember at all times - or as constantly as possible - that you have lost all right to privacy or concealment, and as a reminder of this fact, in our presence you will never close your lips completely, or cross your legs, or press your knees together (you may recall you were forbidden to do this the minute you arrived). ~ Pauline Reage

Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze. ~ Matthew Scully

She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment. ~ Henry James

She never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm 'i th' bud, feed on her damask cheek. She pinned in thought; and, with a green and yellow melancholy, she sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? We men may say more, swear more; but indeed our shows are more than will; for we still prove much in our vows but little in our love. ~ William Shakespeare

Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. ~ William Shakespeare

I am courteous enough to assume that everyone in this so aesthetically voluptuous age, so potent and aroused that conception occurs as easily as with the partridge which, Aristotle says, needs only to hear the voice of the cock or its flight overhead - to assume that at the mere sound of the word 'concealment' everyone can easily shake a dozen romances and comedies from his sleeve. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

He made a wild gesture as if to knock the old man's hat off, called out something like "Catch me if you can," and went racing away across the white, open Circus. Concealment was impossible now; and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the black figure of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging strides like a man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a lecturer upon the body of a harlequin. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Vida Winter's appearance was not calculated for concealment. She was an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her shoulders, the folds of the turquoise-and-green cloth that had cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, was powdered white and finished with bold scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short and square like my own, struck an incongruous tone. ~ Diane Setterfield

Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work, work that matters to the whole community.
This living would include becoming a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of stillness, a listener of wind where each dialect is not only heard but understood. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

It's not what people are showing that's worrying, it's what they are concealing and the extent of the concealment. ~ Et Imperatrix Noctem

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them. ~ Douglas Coupland

There is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. ~ John F. Kennedy

I have myself known two southern wives who exhorted their husbands to free those slaves towards whom they stood in a "parental relation;" and their request was granted. These husbands blushed before the superior nobleness of their wives' natures. Though they had only counseled them to do that which was their duty to do, it commanded their respect, and rendered their conduct more exemplary. Concealment was at an end, and confidence took the place of distrust. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

Guna means strand, and in the Gita the gunas are described as the very fabric of existence, the veil that hides unity in a covering of diversity. Tamas is maya's power of concealment, the darkness or ignorance that hides unitive reality; rajas distracts and scatters awareness, turning it away from reality toward the diversity of the outside world. Thus the gunas are essentially born of the mind. When the mind's activity is stilled, we see life as it is. ~ Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

He was only aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity - the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do. ~ Mark Twain

Ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it. ~ Hannah Arendt

In the darkness as we lie side by side John Cole's left hand snakes over under the sheets and takes a hold of my right hand. We listen to the cries of the night revellers outside and hear the horses tramping along the ways. We're holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment. ~ Sebastian Barry

The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment. ~ John Burroughs

Coming out of the forest was much harder than coming in. Marian had always found coming out difficult- generally, she arrived at a graveyard unencumbered and left with pockets or satchels full of coin and jewels, which made concealment much more difficult. It was of course also tremendously easy to walk into a shop with the intent of stealing, but immensely more of a problem to come out of one with a loaf of bread tucked under her arm. Perhaps most difficult of all had been coming out to her family the day she told them she was their daughter and their sister, as opposed to the son and brother they had previously been lead to believe she was. That had been an odd sort of day. At the time, her ~ Dajo Jago

I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore. ~ Criss Jami

Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.
Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it. ~ Alasdair Gray

Leave in concealment what has long been concealed. ~ Seneca The Younger

That night, she was neglecting her pen in favor of rereading one of the most-favored books in her library. It was a small volume that had appeared mysteriously when she was only fifteen. Josephine still had no idea who had gifted her the lovely horror of Carmilla, but she owed her nameless benefactor an enormous debt. Her personal guess was a briefly employed footman who had seen her reading her mother's well-worn copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho and confessed his own forbidden love of Poe. The slim volume of Le Fanu's Gothic horror stories had been hidden well into adulthood. As it wasn't her father's habit to investigate her reading choices, concealment might have been more for dramatic effect than real fear of discovery. Josephine read by lamplight, curled into an old chaise and basking in the sweet isolation of darkness as she mouthed well-loved passages from her favorite vampire tale.

"For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me."

She slammed the book shut. How had she turned so morbid? For while Josephine had long known she would not live to old age, she thought she had resigned herself to it. She made a point of figh ~ Elizabeth Hunter

The individual who "adjusts" has managed to relegate the two contradictory injunctions of the double bind - to imitate and not to imitate - to two different domains of application. That is, he divides reality in such a way as to neutralize the double bind. This is precisely the procedure of primitive cultures. At the origin of any individual or collective "adjustment" lies concealed a certain arbitrary violence. The well-adjusted person is thus one who conceals his violent impulses and condones the collective's concealment of them. The "maladjusted" individual cannot tolerate this concealment. "Mental illness" and rebellion, like the sacrificial crisis they resemble, commit the individual to falsehoods and to forms of violence that are certainly more damaging to him than the disguised violence channeled through sacrificial rites but that bring him closer to the heart of the enigma. Many psychic catastrophes misunderstood by the psychoanalyst result from an inchoate, obstinate reaction against the violence and falsehood found in any human society ~ Rene Girard

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense. ~ Noam Chomsky

Concealment, my dear Maria, is the foe of tranquility: however I may err in future, I will never be disingenuous in acknowledging my errors. To ~ Fanny Burney

Concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it. ~ Charles M. Blow

The large strings hummed like rain, The small strings whispered like a secret, Hummed, whispered - and then were intermingled Like a pouring of large and small pearls into a plate of jade. We heard an oriole, liquid, hidden among flowers. We heard a brook bitterly sob along a bank of sand ... By the checking of its cold touch, the very string seemed broken As though it could not pass; and the notes, dying away Into a depth of sorrow and concealment of lament, Told even more in silence than they had told in sound ... A silver vase abruptly broke with a gush of water, And out leapt armored horses and weapons that clashed and smote - And before she laid her pick down, she ended with one stroke, And all four strings made one sound, as of rending silk. ~ Eiji Yoshikawa

A fault is fostered by concealment. ~ Virgil

Volubility came easily to Max Ophuls, but it was just one of his many techniques of concealment, and he was never more hidden than when he seemed most open. For ~ Salman Rushdie

The cautious wolf fears the pit, the hawk regards with suspicion the snare laid for her, and the fish the hook in its concealment. ~ Horace

The dark is generous. Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truths of others. The dark protects us from what we dare not know. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter! ~ Roberto Bolano

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese. ~ David Riesman

To live with tremendous and proud composure; always beyond - . To have and not to have one's affects, one's pro and con, at will; to condescend to them, for a few hours; to seat oneself on them as on a horse, often as on an ass - for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as much as of their fire. To reserve one's three hundred foregrounds; also the dark glasses; for there are cases when nobody may look into our eyes, still less into our "grounds." And to choose for company that impish and cheerful vice, courtesy. And to remain master of one's four virtues: of courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves - not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment ~ Galway Kinnell

So . . . what's the plan, then?" Driggs asked, the opaqueness of his body coming and going in waves now, possibly in time with his heartbeat.
"Um - " Uncle Mort winced. "Hide."
Lex's jaw dropped as Uncle Mort ducked behind a tree. "Hide?" she sputtered in disbelief, falling over her own feet as she tried to conceal herself. "That's the best you can come up with?"
He gave her a look. "You got a rocket launcher in that bag of yours? No? Then hide it is. Grotton, get down!" he shouted at the ghost, who was now floating higher and seemed to be glowing more brightly.
Grotton lowered himself to the ground. "I was merely trying to provide a bit of light for your attempts at" - he let out a quiet snicker - "concealment."
Uncle Mort, suppressing the urge to reach up and smack the everdeathing snot out of their new companion, gritted his teeth. "Next time set off some fireworks, it'll be more subtle. ~ Gina Damico