The House At Riverton 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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

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

“But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“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

“. . . happiness grows at our own firesides, . . . . It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“But of course, those who live in memories are never really dead”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Romance makes people forget themselves, do silly things”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different."
"Not a mystery."
Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."
Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Poisons are more my thing”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“I want to know how it feels to be altered by life”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“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, The House At Riverton

“The Latter, I can tell, is added for my benefit. An assumption that the elderly cannot help but be impressed by the old fashioned.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“History was about to intervene: real adventure, real escape and adulthood were lurking, laughing, round the corner”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Why did Hannah marry Teddy? Not because she loved him, but because she was prepared to love him.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Creatures that grow up in the wilderness turn out wild.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Jo sóc a la freda sala d'espera del temps, titil·lant mentre els vells fantasmes i l'eco de les veus es van allunyant.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“Les parets estaven cobertes d'un paper que una vegada devia haver estat de ratlles blaves i blanques, però que el temps i la humitat havien tornat d'un gris brut, amb taques i tires desenganxades.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton

“...time is the master of perspective. A dispassionate master, breathtakingly efficient.”
― Kate Morton, The House At Riverton