“If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.”

The epigraph from George Orwell’s 1984, “If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself,” supplies a compact interpretive key for The Shards: secrecy becomes most durable when concealment turns inward, making the boundary between what is hidden and what is remembered uncertain.

Source and Placement

The book places the sentence alongside the title 1984 and the author’s name, George Orwell, identifying it as a quotation from Orwell’s novel. Its concise, declarative form gives the opening material the force of a principle rather than a scene: before the narrative unfolds, the epigraph proposes that secrecy involves the mind of the keeper as well as the knowledge of anyone being kept in the dark.

Meaning and Narrative Resonance

The sentence makes self-concealment part of the work of preserving a secret. It suggests that hiding is not merely an external act of withholding information; it can also involve suppressing or obscuring one’s own awareness. In that formulation, secrecy unsettles the distinction between deliberate concealment and incomplete self-knowledge, offering a lens for reading a narrative concerned with what can be known, remembered, or kept from oneself.

Relation to the Novel

As an epigraph, the quotation functions as a threshold statement, not as an event within the plot. It does not identify a particular secret or specify who will conceal one. Instead, its general claim establishes an interpretive tension that the novel can develop: the attempt to protect a secret may alter the keeper’s relation to the truth itself. Its significance lies in that double direction of concealment—outward toward others, inward toward the self.