The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
Interpretation
Pretending that a secret doesn't exist is an effective method to maintain its secrecy.
This quote by Margaret Atwood suggests that the act of keeping a secret can often be achieved by simply treating it as if it is not a secret at all. By not acknowledging the secret, one reduces the risk of it being revealed, as it avoids drawing attention and speculation from others.
In practice
In a discussion about privacy, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of discretion.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
A terrace nine stories high begins with a pile of earth.
Escape from the black cloud that surrounds you. _x000D_ Then you will see your own light as radiant as the full moon.
In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.
It is our responsibility to learn to become emotionally intelligent. These are skills, they’re not easy, nature didn’t give them to us - we have to learn them.
Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.
The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.
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