The Secrets We Kept Quotes
"We typed a hundred words per minute and never missed a syllable."
"Most of us viewed the job in the typing pool as temporary."
"We wouldn’t admit it aloud—not even to each other—but many of us believed it would be a first rung toward achieving what the men got right out of college."
"But did we aspire to tension headaches and sore wrists and bad posture?"
"We typed so much, some of us even dreamed of typing."
"The Soviet Russia Division, or SR, became our home away from home."
"We remember looking at the clock every five minutes on Friday afternoons."
"When the men in black suits came, my daughter offered them tea."
"The first time I saw Boris, he was at a reading."
"What is the tallest building in Moscow? Lubyanka, of course. They say you can see all the way to Siberia from the basement."
"The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks."
"Type fast. Don’t ask questions. And don’t take any shit."
"Mama supported us with her business, even paying for my college tuition when I received only a partial scholarship to Trinity."
"They won’t respect you if you don’t look them in the eyes, Irina," she’d told me. "Especially men."
"Excuse me," the older woman in the heavy cardigan asked. She had her hand raised and I burned with embarrassment for her.
"Good for you," Anderson said. He opened the book to the first page. "Shall we begin?"
"There’ll be other opportunities," said the older woman in the cardigan.
"Life was easier being unnoticed—without the whistles that trailed other women, the comments that made them cover their chest with their purse, the eyes that followed them everywhere."
"I needed it too, although I didn’t believe in luck."
"My mother always said I was the type of woman you had to get a good look at to appreciate."
"What do you say?" she said in the extra-loud voice she reserved for telephone calls.
"Tell me about your father," he began as soon as I sat down.
"Do you mind?" Without waiting for me to answer, he clicked the button.
"It has everything to do with your working here. If you’d like to stop now, if you find it too uncomfortable, that’s fine with me."
"He looks at me like I’m about to drop the bomb on the store. Every time!"
"You already did the typing examination. What else do they want you to do? Perform gymnastics? Bake a cake? What else do they need to know?"
"I trust the girls are making you feel welcome?"
"Is he out sick?" Linda interrupted. We took extra-long lunches when Anderson was out.
"How quaint," Henry said, shaking her hand in that bone-crushing way of his. "Henry. Pleasure."
"It’s my business to know everything going on here."
"The world hasn't stopped. It's here. It's right here!"
"They called for me one evening after I’d finished washing Buinaya’s dirty clothes."
"He loves the smell of the cold water flowing below."
"My ideal now is a housewife, My desire is for peace, A pot of soup, and my fine self."
"My only faith was put into a man: my Borya, a mere mortal, a poet."
"They passed in blisters cracked and calluses made from shoveling, in cockroaches killed under our bunks, in the number of visible ribs."
"But the mind takes so much more to survive, and Borya was never far from mine."
"We cried until our eyes were swollen and throats raw. But not one tear dropped for him."
"I learned what human bodies need to survive, how very little we require."
"The earth was hard and frozen, and the pick too heavy for me to raise above my waist."
"I wondered whether they slept together. I didn’t think so, but still, the thought was an ink spot on a white tablecloth."
"What would they look like intertwined? His long, lean torso pressed against the folds of her belly."
"Part of me wanted it to be true. In a strange, twisted way it reassured me he’d still want me when I was old."
"He told me I had nothing to worry about, that my place in his life was forever cemented."
"As we spun, I saw myself in the oval mirror, and I, too, looked happy—but as a mother looks after she’s given birth: elated and exhausted, happy and pained, peaceful and at the same time terrified."
"It’s as if my own words are lost somewhere between putting them to paper and seeing them in print."
"Once, on my return from another fruitless trip, Borya stopped in the middle of the road and announced he no longer believed Zhivago would be published."
"I’d applied to be a typist, but they gave me another job."
"The first time I met Teddy, I was struck by how much he resembled a movie star playing a spy."
"The goal: to emphasize how the Soviet system did not allow free thought—how the Red State hindered, censored, and persecuted even its finest artists."
"They had their satellites, but we had their books."
"Pasternak leaned his shovel against a newly pruned apple tree and approached the men. 'I had forgotten you were coming,' he said, and laughed."
"Feltrinelli paced the hotel’s burnt-orange carpeting as Sergio fetched the manuscript."
"Feltrinelli held it in his hands as if he could feel its significance by its weight."
"I believe it will be. I’ve arranged for the best translator to take a look at it as soon as I get back to Milan."
"Pasternak believes the Soviets will not allow its publication."
"I want to drink good German beer, and I want to dance, and I want to find a few girls."
"He mentioned he was giving himself a death sentence by handing over the novel."
"In the golden light, his white hair looked blond and his eyes seemed to sparkle."
"This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world."
"I’d rather burn Zhivago than let that happen. I’d rather die."
"Everything would change—how you hold your cigarette, how you laugh, how you might blush."
"Us gals gotta stick together. There aren’t many of us."
"Obvious things are the hardest to spot."
"The trick to pinpointing the man with the biggest bank account in the room is not to look to the man in the nicest tux, but to the man not trying to impress."
"To become someone else, you have to want to lose yourself in the first place."
"And when you falter, you go after the lowest-hanging fruit—someone to make you feel wanted and powerful."
"A beautiful woman needs to have something to fall back on when the beauty fades, or she’ll be left with nothing."
"I wasn’t their colleague, their peer. I certainly wasn’t their friend."
"To operate fully under instinct was a gift given to the animals; how much simpler life would be if humans did the same."
"I wanted every contradiction, every opposite. And I wanted it all at once."
"I knew what people called it: an abomination, a perversion, a deviance, an immorality, a depravity, a sin."
"The thrill never dampened—like the moment when a roller coaster crests at the top of the hill and pauses just before it lets gravity pull it down."
"We never talked specifics of our missions, but tired meant things hadn’t gone well, hungry meant things had, and need a drink meant exactly that."
"We unveil ourselves in the pieces we want others to know, even those closest to us."
"Everything was about the book, and nothing mattered more—not the fame the international editions had brought him, nor the looming threat from the State, nor his family, nor mine."
"After all that, Doctor Zhivago was finally on its way to Brussels and the World’s Fair; if all went according to plan, it would be in the hands of Soviet citizens by Halloween."
"All relationships are built on small omissions."
"The Agency needs to maintain the highest reputation, and she replied Yes, of course."
"I watched the black water swirl down the drain. The chemicals made me dizzy, and when I lifted my dripping head, the woman who came to make me into a new woman opened a window."
"Heartbreak can be freeing—the weight lifted, no one left to hurt or be hurt by."
"He didn’t even look up," she said. "Just mumbled into her hoo-hah for me to come back in twenty minutes."
"You too," I said, even though we’d never even given our names."
"I told him I loved it, that he must finish it. 'You really think so?' he asked."
"I don’t think you know me like you think you do."
"I’m saying I just want to be with you—whatever that means for you."
"The only sound was the windshield wipers battling the driving rain."
"They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the ‘blaze of passion’ often falsely ascribed to love."
"If anything, we should speed up," I said. "We won’t have much time now that word has gotten out."
"I did not want this to happen, all this noise. I am filled with a great joy. But my joy today is a lonely joy."
"I’ve accomplished nothing but putting us in danger."
"To go on because that’s what we have to do," I told him.
"I’ll never let them. I think it’s time we left this life."
"But I could tell he said it only to get me to stop crying."
"I no longer mourned the person I used to be."
"How one moment we were together, only to wake and feel the loss all over again."
"On they went, singing 'Rest Eternal,' and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing."
"Anger is a poor replacement for sadness; like cotton candy, the sweetness of revenge disintegrates immediately."
"But I can tell you are a resourceful woman. And one who deserves whatever she asks for."
"Maybe less perceptive men can’t see it, but I can. As Emerson said, one must be an opener of doors."