Kate Morton Quotes

But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.

I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.

I want to know how it feels to be altered by life

After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

The simplest falsehoods are the strongest.

The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.

To tell the truth, she didn't want to; she liked the constancy of preoccupation.

life wasn't a fairy tale and there were instances when one couldn't have everything one wanted, not at the same time. As

Nothing good comes from a death without a funeral.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

But the night times have a way of encouraging extremes

She found a seat in the corner and sat down, opening the cover and breathing in the glorious dusty scent of papery possibility.

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

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

People are fascinating, aren't they, the closer you get to knowing what makes them tick?

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

When you love someone you'll do just about anything to keep them.

A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

Wondering how it was that one person's absence could rob the day so wholly of its shape and meaning.

It hardly needs to be said: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known.

People aren't daft, ... give 'em a bit of love and they'll never stray.

Solid human being, moving in and out of the orbits of others.

But there is a difference between enjoying someone's company, thinking them attractive, and finding oneself helplessly in love.

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

She wasn't sure exactly, but she'd known it absolutely: there was more to life, and it was waiting for her.

Don't wait too long to realize what's important. Your family might drive you mad sometimes, but they're worth more to you than you could ever imagine.

Vivien also knew that the affair was one-sided and that her feelings were not something she would ever share with him.

To be faced with danger and find oneself fearless was thrilling.

Oh, but I do enjoy gray skies! They're so much more complex than blue ones.

It's the past. Thoughts and dreams, hopes and hurts, all brewed together, fermenting slowly in the fusty air, unable ever to dissipate completely.

But it was not so complicated really. Such things rarely are. It was a simple case of stars aligning; those that didn't being nudged into place.

The happiest folks are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.
-The Crone's Eyes

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.

Love, Laurel, that's the only reason to get married. For love.

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

Life was like that, doors of possibility constantly opening and closing as one blindly made one's way through.

She had found there were very few genuinely dull people; the trick was to ask them the right questions.

He was a scribble of a man.

She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

Full of life and light; blissfully unaware of all the future had in store.

Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?

As if I hadn't spent a lifetime pretending to forget.

We are all victims of our human experience," Alice continued, "apt to view the present through the lens of our own past.

It matters not, for she did not need her eyes to tell her who she was. She knew it by your love for her.

I am not a storyteller ... not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.

Even if she loathes it. To do so would be akin to denying the existence of an awkward child.

I can't imagine facing the end of the day without a story to drop into on my way towards sleep.

Reading is one of life's great pleasures; talking about books keeps their worlds alive for longer.

The Latter, I can tell, is added for my benefit. An assumption that the elderly cannot help but be impressed by the old fashioned.

People who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

Loeanneth, so greedy and bold. She wondered

Poisons are more my thing

...home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess.

The ease I had come to expect with him had evaporated, replaced by awkwardness, a confusing tendency towards wrong turns and misunderstandings

There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn't leave me.

shoes made soft, apologetic sounds.

Make sure you write it all down, now. Everything you see and think and feel. Your voice is your own, it matters.

Why did Hannah marry Teddy? Not because she loved him, but because she was prepared to love him.

Youth is an arrogant place...

The original fib was dreary enough, the additional biographical titbits positively inane.

Boredom, as her mother had always told them, was a state to be pitied, the province of the witless.

That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.

Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.

When I was small, I always hid to read. I couldn't shake the feeling that because reading was so pleasurable, it must somehow be illicit.

I should think less of myself if no one disliked me.

Love makes people do cruel things

This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade.

Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.

Sometimes 'feelings' aren't as airy-fairy as they seem. Sometimes they're just the product of observations we haven't realized we've been making.

no matter how hard a person ran, no matter how fresh the start they gave themselves, the past had a way of reaching across the years to catch them.

He would love her with a passion that both frightened and revived him, a desperation that made a mockery of his neat dreams for the future.

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.

Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.

Strange that in the day of tumult, it should be something so innocuous as a dribble of water that prompts a person to tears.

ALL HOUSES have hearts; hearts that have loved, hearts that have billowed with contentment, hearts that have been broken.

The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.

There was a lid for each pot, she'd told me often and soberly, and she thanked God she'd found her lid in my grandfather.

Then lifted the book to my nose and breathed the ink in from its pages. The scent of possibilities.

My thoughts swim. Back and forth, in and out, across the tides of history

When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

As an only child, Cassandra found the well-worn paths of sibling interaction fascinating and horrifying in equal parts.

They say everyone needs something to love.

She had a way of speaking that eschewed intonation. It was a leveler, making the ordinary seem extraordinary and vice versa.

A person never forgets the landscape of their childhood'.

She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside.

Which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?

How bright such memories seem when the life they catalogue is threatened! Afterwards,

A figment who'd slipped through the cracks of history and been forgotten.

I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.

They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions ...

Creatures that grow up in the wilderness turn out wild.

It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physical desires.

I'm just titivating our dinner.

Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.

Lack of potatoes left a person's stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul.

But it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred?

There was a pessimism in his soul, a darkness in his outlook, that always left her somehow more aware of hard edges than she had been before.

It was not the first time I had been reminded of what happened at Riverton, to Robbie and the Hartford sisters. Once