This collection of quotes from No One Can Know by Kate Alice Marshall explores the novel's central themes of family trauma, buried secrets, and the inescapable influence of the past. Each quote is analyzed for its significance to the characters, plot, and overarching narrative.
Most Important Quotes
These quotes are essential to understanding the core mystery and emotional heart of the novel.
The Plan
"This is what we’re going to do,” she says, and when she tells them, they don’t argue. They don’t say anything. They simply obey.
Speaker: Emma Palmer | Context: Immediately after discovering her parents' bodies, a sixteen-year-old Emma takes charge of her two sisters, Daphne and Juliette (in the Preface).
Analysis: This moment inaugurates Emma’s lifelong role as strategist and shield, forged in an instant of trauma. Her sisters’ wordless compliance signals both their shock and their instinctive reliance on Emma, forming a fragile unity rooted in fear. It is also the point of origin for the web of Secrets and Lies that will shape their adult lives, turning a single night into an enduring, corrosive pact. The stark, declarative rhythm of the line underscores how decisiveness becomes survival—and how that same decisiveness will later become a prison.
The Last Truth
"Our parents are dead,” she says again, to no one in particular. It’s the last true thing she says for a long time.
Speaker: Narrator (about Emma) | Context: After calling the police and setting their plan in motion, Emma reflects on the statement she made (Preface).
Analysis: By juxtaposing a simple fact with the promise of sustained deception, this line crystallizes the novel’s tension between reality and narrative, foregrounding the theme of Truth vs. Perception. It foreshadows Emma’s status as a functional yet burdened unreliable narrator, not from malice but necessity. The sentence’s clean finality reads like a verdict, marking the boundary between the world before and the elaborate story Emma will construct to protect her sisters. It lodges in the reader’s mind as a warning: every memory and confession to come is compromised by design.
The Pact
"No one can know."
Speaker: Daphne Palmer | Context: Emma recalls Daphne whispering these four words to her on the night of the murders, cementing their pact of silence (Chapter 5).
Analysis: The title phrase is devastating in its brevity, compressing fear, loyalty, and complicity into four words. Spoken by the youngest sister, it signals an early, chilling comprehension of stakes far beyond childhood. The line becomes the governing law of their lives, securing their bond while simultaneously sowing mistrust and distance—a paradox at the core of their sisterhood and shifting loyalties. Its power lies in ambiguity: it protects everyone by withholding specifics, and in doing so, it traps them inside a collective secrecy that erodes intimacy.
The Inescapable Past
"What about your parents’ house?” he asked, and there was something odd in his tone—like he’d been waiting to bring it up all along.
Speaker: Nathan Gates | Context: After revealing he has lost his job and they are losing their apartment, Nathan suggests to a newly pregnant Emma that they move into her abandoned family home (Chapter 1).
Analysis: This seemingly practical question is the key that unlocks the past, forcing Emma back to the site of her defining trauma and activating the theme of The Past's Influence on the Present. The slight off-note in Nathan’s tone hints at opportunism and foreshadows cracks in their relationship, as his logic collides with her buried terror. Irony sharpens the moment: what sounds simple to him is ruinously complicated for her. The house becomes a character in its own right—part refuge, part mausoleum—pulling Emma into a reckoning she’s postponed for fourteen years.
Thematic Quotes
Secrets and Lies
A Partial Truth
Emma had never lied to Nathan about her past. Not exactly. She’d told him she had two sisters... He’d asked how her parents died... She hadn’t lied. She’d let him lie for her. “Was it an accident?” he’d asked. “They never found the person,” she had said, and let him think it was the answer to his question.
Speaker: Narrator (about Emma) | Context: Emma reflects on the carefully curated version of her past that she has presented to her husband, Nathan (Chapter 1).
Analysis: This passage anatomizes the mechanics of concealment central to Secrets and Lies, showing how omission can masquerade as honesty. Emma’s phrasing—technically accurate, emotionally evasive—exposes the ethical gray zone she lives in to protect her sisters and herself. The repetition of “She hadn’t lied” followed by its undercutting twist creates a rhythm of self-justification that reveals her internal strain. As a foundation for her marriage, this half-truth is a hairline fracture that will widen under pressure, proving that silence is its own form of deceit.
The Taste of Deception
His tongue slid between her teeth, and she wondered if he tasted the secrets lingering there.
Speaker: Narrator (about Emma) | Context: After confessing to Nathan that her parents were murdered, but not the whole truth, they are intimate (Chapter 1).
Analysis: Sensory imagery converts a kiss into an allegory for exposure, as intimacy threatens to dissolve the boundary between Emma’s exterior and her hidden life. The tactile language—tongue, teeth, taste—makes secrecy feel physical, almost contaminating, as if her lies have seeped into her body. The moment fuses love and dread, illustrating how deception hollows out closeness even at its most tender. It’s a vivid encapsulation of how secrecy colonizes the self, turning connection into a risk.
Family Trauma and Dysfunction
A Mother's Cruelty
"She doesn’t need that thing. She needs to pull herself together... It’s not asthma, it’s a panic attack. It’s in her head... It’s a placebo, and I am done coddling her."
Speaker: Irene Palmer | Context: Irene refuses to give her daughter Daphne her inhaler during a severe asthma or panic attack, dismissing her suffering as a mental weakness (Chapter 6).
Analysis: Irene’s contemptuous dismissal of illness reveals a household where appearances and control eclipse care, anchoring the novel’s portrait of Family Trauma and Dysfunction. Her language pathologizes vulnerability and weaponizes skepticism, recasting medical need as moral failure. The scene’s cruelty provides both motive and psychological context for the sisters’ later choices, showing how survival required adaptation, not comfort. By withholding aid, Irene turns nurture into harm, and that inversion reverberates through her daughters’ adult lives.
A Daughter's Wish
"It’s true. I hate them. Both of them. I wish they were dead."
Speaker: Emma Palmer | Context: In a moment of emotional distress, a teenage Emma confesses her hatred for her parents to Gabriel Mahoney (Chapter 6).
Analysis: Stripped of irony, this adolescent outcry becomes damning in hindsight, functioning as both character revelation and grim dramatic irony once the murders occur. It captures how abuse corrodes ordinary familial bonds until anger feels like the only available language. The line also frames the legal and social narrative that later implicates Emma: a charged, contextless statement made legible as motive. Its rawness forces readers to confront the gap between fantasy and irrevocable consequence.
Sisterhood and Shifting Loyalties
Worlds Apart
None of them look at the others. None of them reach out for comfort, for reassurance, or offer it in turn. They are each a world of their own.
Speaker: Narrator | Context: As the police arrive, the three sisters stand on the porch, united in their lie but completely isolated in their grief and fear (Preface).
Analysis: The repeated negations—none, none, each—emphasize isolation at the very moment of collusion, capturing the paradox of a pact that binds and estranges. The metaphor of “worlds” evokes separate orbits, suggesting gravity without contact, loyalty without warmth. This image anticipates years of silence and distance, implying that the cover-up was also an emotional severance. In a single tableau, the novel defines its core relationship dynamic: solidarity in secrecy, loneliness in everything else.
Character-Defining Quotes
Emma Palmer
He was looking at her like he was waiting for her to tell him what to do. Because she always knew what to do. She was always the one with the plan.
Speaker: Narrator (about Emma) | Context: After Nathan reveals their financial and housing crisis, he looks to Emma for a solution (Chapter 1).
Analysis: This observation distills Emma’s identity into a role—planner, fixer, captain—that began the night of the murders and calcified over time. The anaphora of “always” underscores how competence has become expectation, transforming strength into burden. It also clarifies her relationship dynamic with Nathan, whose reliance mirrors her sisters’ past dependence and keeps her trapped in the same survival posture. The line’s quiet inevitability explains both her effectiveness and her exhaustion.
Nathan Gates
"You’re not being rational. We need a place to live. You own a house. It’s not complicated."
Speaker: Nathan Gates | Context: Nathan dismisses Emma's visceral fear of returning to her family home, framing it as a simple, logical solution to their problems (Chapter 1).
Analysis: Nathan’s clipped logic reduces trauma to utility, revealing his blind spot: the belief that practical answers erase emotional realities. The blunt cadence—short sentences, hard stops—mimics his insistence and emotional shallowness. Irony runs through his claim that it’s “not complicated,” as the house is the most fraught site in Emma’s life. The line positions him as a foil to Emma: pragmatic, yes, but fundamentally out of tune with the cost of survival.
Daphne Palmer
She likes to imagine that she can fold herself in half and in half again, over and over until she is a tiny speck drifting. Until she is nothing at all.
Speaker: Narrator (about Daphne) | Context: During her police interview as a child, Daphne retreats into herself, wishing for invisibility (Chapter 3).
Analysis: The recursive image of folding evokes self-erasure as a coping mechanism, a child’s imaginative strategy for disappearing from harm. Metaphor turns dissociation into motion—smaller, smaller, gone—capturing how trauma teaches invisibility as safety. It reflects the household’s punitive environment, where being seen meant vulnerability. The line lingers because it reads like a survival prayer that becomes a personality.
Juliette "JJ" Palmer
She had never been sure what Emma knew—or guessed, or suspected—about that night. She might not know anything. She might know everything. It was all the territory in between that frightened JJ the most.
Speaker: Narrator (about Juliette "JJ" Palmer) | Context: Upon learning Emma is returning to the house, JJ is consumed with fear about what secrets might be unearthed (Chapter 9).
Analysis: JJ lives in the liminal space between certainty and suspicion, and the passage’s incremental phrasing maps that anxiety. The “territory in between” is the novel’s moral landscape: partial truths, guesses, omissions. It suggests JJ’s own complicity or knowledge is not clean, fueling paranoia that distance cannot cure. As character study, it defines her not by action but by dread, which is no less decisive.
Memorable Lines
The Rot of Arden Hills
Arden Hills was like a dead tree in a forest. Even as it rotted, new life had sprung up, feeding off the decay. Real estate agents and New York transplants took the place of beetles and fungi, that was all...
Speaker: Narrator | Context: Emma observes the changes in her hometown as she and Nathan drive back for the first time (Chapter 2).
Analysis: The extended metaphor reframes gentrification as ecological succession, implying that progress is merely repurposed rot. It echoes the theme of the past shaping the present: decay doesn’t vanish; it becomes substrate for what comes next. The imagery is both beautiful and accusatory, suggesting the town’s polished surface is nourished by buried damage. As setting, Arden Hills mirrors Emma’s interior: rebuilt atop something still decomposing.
Opening and Closing Lines
Opening Line
She looks at the body of her mother, sprawled in the hallway.
Speaker: Narrator | Context: The very first sentence of the book, describing a young Emma discovering the crime scene (Preface).
Analysis: The novel chooses impact over exposition, dropping the reader into trauma without cushioning. Its stark immediacy reorients the mystery away from whodunit mechanics toward aftermath and memory. The concrete image—“sprawled in the hallway”—fixes the scene in place, a picture Emma cannot stop seeing. It primes the book’s central concern: how early violence scripts a life.
Closing Line of the Preface
It’s the last true thing she says for a long time.
Speaker: Narrator | Context: The final line of the opening section, after Emma has told the 911 operator that her parents are dead (Preface).
Analysis: As a coda to the preface, the sentence reframes everything that follows as a story told through necessary distortions. It functions like a thesis statement for secrecy, establishing narrative tension and inviting skepticism toward every recollection. The crisp finality of “for a long time” stretches into the years the novel spans, turning time itself into a measure of deception. It’s a perfect hinge: the truth ends here, and the cost of silence begins.