Secret guilt is by silence revealed.

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

The point is this: guilt must not be allowed to fester in the silence of the soul, poisoning it from within. It needs to be confessed. Through confession, we bring it into the light, we place it within Christ’s purifying love (cf. Jn 3:20-21). In confession, the Lord washes our soiled feet over and over again and prepares us for table fellowship with him.

If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.

Silence hung in the air like secret loss.

His silence made him feel ashamed, as if by keeping quiet he was mocking the others. And like a punishment there grew, alongside his shame, a feeling of loneliness. Teodoro was a man set apart, silenced by a secret.

Open suspecting others comes of secret condemning themselves.

In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.

If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.

Sometimes to be silent is to lie.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

To this day she didn’t know if he taken her disgusted refusal to defend herself for a covert admission of guilt.