Nancy > Nancy's Quotes

“Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“What could be more perfect than marrying the person you love.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realized. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, she'd been made to function best at a certain tuning.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“But it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“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, The Secret Keeper

“It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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, The Distant Hours

“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, The Distant Hours

“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, The Distant Hours

“There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“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. For although I didn't know it then, after falling deep inside the world of the Mud Man, real life was never going to be able to compete with fiction again. I've been grateful to Miss Perry ever sense, for when she handed that novel over the counter and urged my harried mother to pass it on to me, she'd either confused me with a much older child or else she'd 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 sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Her eyes, though tired, had the glint of one who never stopped expecting to be amused, and her mouth turned up at the corners as if she'd just remembered a joke. It was the sort of face that drew strangers , that enchanted them and made them want to know her better. The way she had of making you feel, with a slight twitch of the jaw, that she had suffered as you did, that everything would be better now simply for having come within her orbit: that was her real beauty - her presence, her joy, her magnetism. That, and her splendid appetite for the make-believe.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Who are you, Dorothy?" she said beneath her breath. "Who were you, before you became Ma?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“...and time thickened so that the seconds passed like years.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“...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, The Secret Keeper

“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, The Secret Keeper

“... wondering how it was that one person's absence could rob the day so wholly of its shape and meaning.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours