“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Truth of Intercourse.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: 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?

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Robert Louis Stevenson118

Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer 1850–1894

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