Kate Morton > Quotes

“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....”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

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

“I don’t have many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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, The Forgotten Garden

“Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery ...”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“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, The House At Riverton

“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 Distant Hours

“...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

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

“when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“... time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised ...”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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...”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“There’s something about hospital walls; though only made of bricks and plaster, when you’re inside them the noise, the reality of the teeming city beyond, disappears; it’s just outside the door, but it might as well be a magical land far, far away.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.”
― Kate Morton

“I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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, The Forgotten Garden

“They say everyone needs something to love.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Life'd be a lot easier if it were like a fairy tale," said Cassandra, "if people belonged to stock character types."
"Oh, but people do, they only think they don't. Even the person who insists such things don't exist is a cliché: the dreary pedant who insists on his own uniqueness!”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton

“The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“If you don't stop apologizing, you're going to convince me you've done something wrong. . . .”
― 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, The House At Riverton