Kate Morton Quotes

Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open.

She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

I want to be independent. To meet interesting people. ... I just mean new people with clever things to say. Things I've never heard before. I want to be free. Open to whatever adventure comes along and sweeps me off my feet.

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

She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.

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.

What could be more perfect than marrying the person you love.

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.

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.

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

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

And then he was kissing her, and she was struck by his nearness, his solidity, his smell. It was of the garden and the earth and the sun. When Cassandra opened her eyes, she realized she was crying. She wasn't sad, though, these were the tears of being found, of having come home after a long time away.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.

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

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

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.

You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor." "I don't want to survive it." "I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice.

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

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.

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.

Sometimes, Edie, a person's feelings aren't rational. At least, they don't seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base

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

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

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.

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

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.

When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

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

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

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

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

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

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she'd run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.

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

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.

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

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

They say everyone needs something to love.