Kate Morton Quotes & Sayings

who does any unauthorized act in relation — Kate Morton

Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing [as a nice safe history]. — Kate Morton

It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation. — Kate Morton

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. — Kate Morton

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. — Kate Morton

And Juniper had understood, somehow, that in Tom she'd found the person who could balance her, and that more than anything, to fall in love was to be caught, to be saved ... — Kate Morton

Love affairs, in their beginnings, are all about the present. But there is a point in each
an event, an exchange, some other unseen trigger
which forces the past and the future back into focus. — Kate Morton

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

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

Nothing good comes from a death without a funeral. — Kate Morton

The house remembered her. Laurel did not consider herself a romantic, but the sense was so strong that for a moment she had no trouble believing that the combination before her of wooden boards and red chimney bricks, or dappled roof tiles and gabled windows at odd angles, was capable of remembrance. — Kate Morton

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

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

Love is like that: insistent, sure, persuasive. It silences easily all whispers of misgiving. — Kate Morton

If she didn't learn to stop her mind racing on ahead of her she'd end up running into a mountain made of her own imaginings. — Kate Morton

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

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. — Kate Morton

Weary of knowing too much and understanding too little. — Kate Morton

babies in prams at the park. — Kate Morton

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read. — Kate Morton

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

Dragonflies didn't imagine they could sense the future; they just flew about, enjoying the sun on their wings. — Kate Morton

I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn't been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn't positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained twiddling my thumbs until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn't; I maintain that I simply couldn't. Sometimes, you can tell just by looking at a door there's something interesting behind it. — Kate Morton

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

Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?'
'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.'
'The city still has working phone booths?'
'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble. — Kate Morton

You mustn't wait for someone to rescue you, ... A girl expecting rescue never learns to rescue herself. Even with the means, she'll find her courage wanting. — Kate Morton

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

You will know your job is done well when it goes unnoticed, that you have succeeded when you are unnoticed. — Kate Morton

The single static note amidst the swirl of activity was Grandmother deShiel, who sat small and hunched on the cast-iron garden seat outside the library, lost in her cobwebbed memories and completely oblivious to the round glass lanterns being strung up in the trees around her - — Kate Morton

difference between tales and truth, — Kate Morton

Love makes people do cruel things — Kate Morton

Loneliness had made the Queen bitter, bitterness had made her selfish, and selfishness had made her suspicious.
--The Changeling — Kate Morton

Was that what Nell had done, too? Forsaken the life and the family she'd been given, to focus instead on the one she'd been without. — Kate Morton

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

People change as they get older ... grow wiser, make better decisions ... i am very old,Laurel. Anyone who lives as long as I have can't help but collect regrets along the way ... things they did in the past ... things they wish they'd done differently. — Kate Morton

...it seemed hope's glimmer always hovered in the distance, no matter how long one journeyed towards it without success. — Kate Morton

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

And finally it seemed autumn had realized it was September. The last lingering days of summer had been pushed off stage and in the hidden garden long shadows stretched towards winter. The ground was littered with spent leaves, orange and pale green, and chestnuts on spiky coats sat proudly on the fingertips of cold branches. — Kate Morton

he was a man on a date with destiny, — Kate Morton

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. — Kate Morton

Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings. — Kate Morton

It suddenly seemed to Laurel that all the absences in her own life, every loss and sadness, every nightmare in the dark, every unexplained melancholy, took the shadowy form of the same unanswered question, something that had been there since she was sixteen years old - her mother's unspoken secret. — Kate Morton

Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person's soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it. — Kate Morton

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings. — Kate Morton

All her life, Alice had been interested in people. She didn't always like them, she rarely sought their company for reasons of social fulfillment, but she did find them fascinating. And there was nowhere better for seeing people than in the rabbit warrens of the Underground. All of London passed through those tunnels, a steady flow of humanity in its many weird and wonderful forms, and among them Alice slipped like a ghost. — Kate Morton

But the night times have a way of encouraging extremes — Kate Morton

As I already said, they didn't look like much
but beauty's in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? — Kate Morton

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

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 — Kate Morton

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

It's special, grandparents and grandchldren. So much simpler. Is it always so, I wonder? I think perhaps it is. While one's child takes a part of one's heart to use and misuse as they please, a grandchild is different. Gone are the bonds of guilt and responsibility that burden the maternal relationship. The way to love is free. — Kate Morton

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

A man had said that to her once at the stage door. She'd been leaving after a theatre session, buzzing still with the high of performance, and he'd stopped her to say how much he'd enjoyed it. "You've a great talent for observation," he'd said. "Ears, eyes, and heart, all at once. — Kate Morton

the sun seeming to hesitate in the process of setting, as if it couldn't bear to end the day. It was teetering on the horizon, throwing ribbons of pink and mauve across the sky like life ropes, and the air was sweet with jasmine. — Kate Morton

Over the course of weeks, taking great care never to revel her inward state of flux, Percy had evaluated her situation, observing her feelings from all angles before finally reaching the conclusion that she was, quite clearly, several shades of crazy. — Kate Morton

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

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

It's only with age I have learned solely to listen to things I want to hear. — Kate Morton

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

How ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn't know the first thing about being brave. — Kate Morton

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

Nana never remarried, but not for lack of offers. She was resolute: it was one thing to be a young man's darling, she said, but she wasn't going to be an old man's slave. — Kate Morton

But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists. — Kate Morton

Our hands meet for an instant and she withdraws quickly, frightened she might catch something. Old age perhaps. — Kate Morton

The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly ... It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself. — Kate Morton

She was a bookish person who'd never been exposed to books: she was gifted with astute powers of observation, but her thoughts and feelings weren't filtered through those that she'd read, those that had been written before. She had a unique way of seeing the world and a manner of expressing herself that caught Juniper unawares and made her laugh and think and feel things anew. — Kate Morton

Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night. — Kate Morton

One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped. — Kate Morton

I laughed because he told me funny stories and it was so easy and light. I realized how long it has been since I've enjoyed that most simple of pleasures: company and conversation on a sunny afternoon. I am impatient for such pleasures, Katy. I am no longer a girl - I am a woman, and I want things, things that I will not have; but it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred? What — Kate Morton

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

Ignorance clarifies. It selects and omits with placid perfection. — Kate Morton

So much in life came down to timing. — Kate Morton

A way of looking at you that told you she was listening, that she understood all you were saying, and all you weren't. — Kate Morton

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. — Kate Morton

It was just the same as spotting the scaffolding in other writers' books. Awareness of construction didn't diminish her pleasure, only added to it. — Kate Morton

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

Hannah didn't see Robbie again for weeks after that. She thought he'd forgotten his promise to lend her his book of poetry. It was just like him, she suspected, to charm his way into a dinner invitation, make empty promises, then vanish without honoring them. She was not offended, merely disappointed in herself for being taken in. — Kate Morton

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

Give someone more time and they'll appear to have done more with it. — Kate Morton

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

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. — Kate Morton

Watching the vast ocean, the flickering sunlight, thinking of the distant lands, Eliza was enveloped by a feeling quite unlike any she'd experienced before. A warmth, a glimpse of possibility, an absence of wariness- — Kate Morton

You've said before, Ms. Nicolson, that your mother was a strong woman. She lived through the war, — Kate Morton

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

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? — Kate Morton

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. — Kate Morton

There were moments in which a person reached a crossroads, when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life's events. — Kate Morton

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. — Kate Morton

The only thing one can count on is that no one else can truly be counted on. Alice — Kate Morton

A place is more than the sum of its physical parts; it's a repository for memories, a record and retainer of all that has happened within its boundaries. — Kate Morton

She was the eldest now and had inherited the vague, relentless, unsolicited responsibility such familial rank demanded. — Kate Morton

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

All are shaped by things beyond their control, traits inherited, traits learned. For Linus, the piece of his leg bone that had refused to lengthen defined him. As he grew, lameness begot shyness, shyness begot stammer, and thus Linus grew into an unlikeable little boy who discovered that attention came his way only when he behaved badly. — Kate Morton

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

The wedding photographs were stained with black umbrellas. — Kate Morton

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. — Kate Morton

Quite simply the book and I were meant to be together. — Kate Morton

I read a lot ... I love books. I work with books. Books are my life. — Kate Morton

I sometimes feel my entire life is a series of accidents and chances- not that I am complaining. One can be very happy having relinquished all expectation of control. — Kate Morton

To hear years of one's life, one's passion, described so casually, relegated so absolutely to the past, was breathtaking. — Kate Morton