Discreet Quotes

1. "She's aware of her fondness for ledger keeping, a term that marriage counselors use to castigate their clients for keeping a running tally of who did what to whom, which is not in the spirit of generosity that supposedly nurtures a healthy relationship. The way she sees it, generosity is admirable but not always practical. Without some discreet retaliation to balance things out, a little surreptitious tit for tat to keep the grievances at bay, most relationships—hers included—would surely combust in a blaze of resentment."
Author: A.S.A. Harrison

2. "Whereas, once again, the machine destroyed everything: you were killed discreetly, with a little shame and with great precision."
Author: Albert Camus

3. "She tried discreetly to squint and instead came off looking as if she had discreetly farted."
Author: Alessandra Torre

4. "Certainly my life will not ever be as private and discreet, and perhaps I should even use the word insulated, as it was before."
Author: Anita Hill

5. "They also explained how the sensors can monitor the levels of acetone on people's breath, and this can be used to tell people who suffer from diabetes when their next insulin shot is due. This is a more discreet method than what is currently on the market."
Author: Anne Campbell

6. "Be discreet in all things, and so render it unnecessary to be mysterious."
Author: Arthur Wellesley

7. "A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence; but I say Providence will not dispense with the means, though He often blesses them when they are used discreetly."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

8. "I think Joan's advice would be: always know more than anyone else, always be discreet as possible. And never cry at work."
Author: Christina Hendricks

9. "I see that the wardrobe looks penetrable because it has a door. But when I open it, I see that penetration has been put off: since inside is also a wooden surface, like a closed door. Function of the wardrobe: to keep drag and disguises hidden. Nature: that of the inviolability of things. Relation to people: we look at ourselves in the mirror on the inside of the door, we always look at ourselves in an inconvenient light because the wardrobe is never in the right place: awkward, it stands wherever it fits, always huge, hunchbacked, shy and clumsy, unaware how to be more discreet, for it has too much presence. A wardrobe is enormous, intrusive, sad, kind."
Author: Clarice Lispector

10. "They all occupied the same space but did not occupy it together. Imagine a thousand leaves of tracing paper, each with one person lightly pencilled on it, all stacked atop a scene of a frozen city block. A thousand discreet and solitary realities that appear to be occurring in the same location."
Author: Doug Dorst

11. "Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot."
Author: Edmund Waller

12. "We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet."
Author: Eleanor Catton

13. "Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having the openness and exuberance of youth, while a tyrant counts this a danger, and seeks to slay or silence those possessed of spirit, while the discreet fear his power and violence."
Author: Euripides

14. "A real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages in all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the Bishop is locked up in the coal-cellar, that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the Bishop must be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the Bishop has been locked up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him; then indeed we may properly say that there has arisen a problem; for upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it."
Author: Gregory David Roberts

16. "Maugham's success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus--by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery--in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life."
Author: H.L. Mencken

17. "Bramble had taken another pencil from Delphinium, and Azalea's napkin, and wrote something new.You're afraid of the King. Admit it.Azalea grimaced at her untouched food, burning in humiliation as Lord Bradford took the napkin and read it. This time, he looked to be discreetly writing something back beneath the table.Fairweller blinked at the King for a moment, in which Lord Bradford handed Bramble her napkin. She opened it and turned a rosy pink.My lady, it read,who isn't?Bramble pursed her lips and kicked Lord Bradford beneath the table-hard. His face twitched befre regaining its solemn expression.Azalea buried her face in her hands."All we ask is for you to consider it. That is all," said Fairweller."Oh." Lord Bradford's voice was slightly strangled. "Yes. Thank you."Bramble threw the pencil-smudged napkin onto her plate. "I'm done," she said. "May we go to our room now?"
Author: Heather Dixon

18. "The public's nerves are raw and edgy. You have to be discreet and understanding about the films you are showing."
Author: Jack Valenti

19. "I'll be real discreet," Tank said. As discreet as a six-foot-six, no-neck guy weighing three hundred and fifty pounds, all dressed in black SWAT clothes, with a Glock holstered at his side could be."
Author: Janet Evanovich

20. "Know this...she does not want to become the shadow of her husband, but the moon of his life, for when she appears, her presence is powerful in all her mysterious ways...she comes and goes so discreetly, waning and waxing whilst forever leaving her presence behind, reminding you that you cannot survive life without her..."
Author: Jemina Akhtar

21. "My grill is intended to be discreet. It's there because I enjoy jewelry."
Author: Jill Scott

22. "Sarah, in the crush, was able to study Miss Lucas's face discreetly, she wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died."
Author: Jo Baker

23. "Chaperons don't enforce morality; they force immorality to be discreet."
Author: Judith Martin

24. "The modern designers are quite showy, and a lot of the young people really like it. Costume jewelry has always been about being noticed and not discreet."
Author: Judith Miller

25. "I have a short temper - I think it's part of the Celtic background. I used to be a lot more angry, but I was quite discreet with it."
Author: Julian Lennon

26. "It's a slow sultry song. She opens her mouth and what comes out can only be described as dripping with sex. The climax of the song comes and the college boys are cat calling her but she doesn't seem to notice at all. She's completely in the song, eyes half mast, a slight smile on her lips, and hips methodically rolling to the beat. She's pure sex and every male in the bar is thinking the same thing I am. What would she be like in my bed. She absent mindedly trails her hand from her collarbone down between her breasts to her belly. It's the hottest thing I've ever seen. My jeans instantly get too tight in the crotch and I adjust myself discreetly while everyone's eyes are still on her."
Author: K. Larsen

27. "I hope that increasing numbers of Christians adopt the practice of wearing a cross in a simple and discreet way as a symbol of their beliefs."
Author: Keith O'Brien

28. "That boy wouldn't know discreet if it tap-danced on his stupid blond head."
Author: Kiersten White

29. "Instead of an ugly scratch of a scar, he'd given her a beautiful piece of himself. A snowflake. Small and discreet, noticeable if you knew to look, but otherwise really just for her. A gift."
Author: Laura Kaye

30. "Members of your family might say they are working hard all day long, while you are off at school or clarinet lessons, but the only way to know this for sure is to follow them at a discreet distance."
Author: Lemony Snicket

31. "I've got a very behind-the-scenes personality. I don't know how I became a performer. I like to stay discreet, out of the public eye, very low-key."
Author: Leon Redbone

32. "You don't have a mommy," Gunnar proclaimed as he walked around Breccan. "Ok, I want my surrogate," Breccan said as he sped up to catch the other men. Darius came forward to walk in step beside Wharick and whispered in a discreet tone, "Please, let me kill him."
Author: Madison Thorne Grey

33. "Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paperdoll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. She is not bored, she has no other interests."
Author: Margaret Atwood

34. "Indeed, I was so afraid to dishonour my friends and family by my indiscreet actions, that I rather chose to be accounted a fool, than to be thought rude or wanton."
Author: Margaret Cavendish

35. "But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth."
Author: Marie De France

36. "She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board."
Author: Michel Faber

37. "If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever."
Author: Milan Kundera

38. "Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense."
Author: O. Henry

39. "If you have had an unfortunate experience, forget it. If you have made a failure in speech, your song, your book, your article, if you have been placed in an embarrassing position, if you have fallen and hurt yourself by a false step, if you have been slandered and abused, do not dwell upon it. There is not a single redeeming feature in these memories, and the presence of their ghosts will rob you of many a happy hour. There is nothing in it. Drop them. Forget them. Wipe them out of your mind forever. If you have been indiscreet, imprudent, if you have been talked about, if your reputation has been injured so that you fear you can never outgrow it or redeem it, do not drag the hideous shadows, the rattling skeletons about with you, Rub them off from the shite of memory. Wipe them out. Forget them. Start with a clean slate and spend all your energies in keeping it clean for the future."
Author: Orison Swett Marden

40. "Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are."
Author: Oscar Wilde

41. "A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this."
Author: Robert Bly

42. "Command that no one be received, or kept to be of your household indoors or without, if one has not reasonable belief of them that they are faithful, discreet, and painstaking in the office for which they are received, and withal honest and of good manners."
Author: Robert Grosseteste

43. "History is made up of "moral" judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin's acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values."
Author: Saul D. Alinsky

44. "Connecting in sips may work for gathering discreet bits of information, they may work for saying, "I'm thinking about you," or even for saying, "I love you," but they don't really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other. And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development."
Author: Sherry Turkle

45. "The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco."
Author: Susan Hill

46. "...I'll never forget going out to dinner with my parents to an elegant restaurant. My very proper Bostonian mother leaned over and said to me, 'Just what are you going to do if the baby gets hungry while we're here, dear?' The baby and I were already hooked up, very discreetly and my mother couldn't tell. I just chuckled and said, 'I don't know Mom."
Author: Susan McCutcheon Rosegg

47. "That meddling in other people's affairs...formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention."
Author: T.S. Eliot

48. "Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine, and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened - or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the fakes serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

49. "The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern."
Author: Willa Cather

50. "Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower."
Author: Yann Martel

Discreet Quotes Pictures