Kate Morton Quotes

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

It didn't occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.

Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .

In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.

It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.

She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained.

She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

But happiness ... happiness grows at our own firesides," she said. "It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens." ~ The House at Riverton

While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.

We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.

Darling girl, blinded by foolish thoughts of love. How to tell her that the hearts of men were not so easily won. If won, rarely kept.

Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.

It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.

Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.

When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?

Time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised.

The prospect of an early death sits differently upon each person. In some it gifts maturity far outweighing their age and experience: calm acceptance blossoms into a beautiful nature and soft countenance. In others, however, it leads to the formation of a tiny ice flint in their heart. Ice that, though at times concealed, never properly melts. Rose, though she would have liked to be one of the former, knew herself deep down to be one of the latter.

Nell was not one for friends and had never hidden her distaste for most other humans, their neurotic compulsion for the acquisition of allies.

You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.

There were two now where they had been three. David's death had dismantled the triangle, and an enclosed space was now open. Two points are unreliable; with nothing to anchor them, there is nothing to stop them drifting in opposite directions. If it is string that binds, it will eventually snap and the points will separate; if elastic, they will continue to part, further and further, until the strain reaches its limit and they are pulled back with such speed that they cannot help but collide with devastating force.

It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I'd been missing.

But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

They say everyone needs something to love.

. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.

Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden

Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.

She either confused me with a much older child or else she glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I've always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it's the librarian's one sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

Those who live in memories are never really dead." The House At Riverton