Homecoming Quotes

“Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, s sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away," it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn't experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“There's other ways to travel."
She was right. He had books, and there was no barrier to the places he could visit in his own mind.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“For all that "home" was considered a word of warmth and comfort, policemen knew better. Home is where the heart is, and the heart could be a dark and damaged place.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“We can’t allow ourselves to be the victims of our childhoods,” she said. “One can’t blame one’s parents—or indeed one’s children—for everything. Most people do the best they can and sometimes, sadly, it’s not enough.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“What is the truth anyway?" Jess had once been asked by a curious friend.
"It's what happened."
"According to whom?”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“There’s no point looking backward,” she’d say. “Just make a choice and then trust yourself to have chosen correctly.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“A mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed. It was how people defined themselves, in a reliance upon the stories about themselves that they were told by others. Nora”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that's happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.” Jess”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn’t experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Policemen grew tough skins. The job required them to confront the worst of humankind while somehow keeping enough of themselves tender to remain good husbands and fathers, decent members of society.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“that after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Polly had certainly made some wrong turns - strange how easy the signposts were to see in the rearview mirror - but she had learned long ago that it was pointless to give in in to the black temptation of regret.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“One step at a time," Nora used to say if Jess suffered a disappointment at school. "Anything can be overcome, any distance traveled, just put one foot in front of the other and keep on going until you get there.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Jess and Polly stood without speaking, letting the sounds of the garden resettle. A flock of tiny fairy wrens darted busily in and around the base of a nearby plum tree, crickets ticked in the long grass, and a sense of timelessness, of nature, older and more pervasive than anything human beings and their histories could generate, grew thick and warm around them.
"Shall we take a walk down together?" said Polly.
Jess noticed a new note of self-possession in her mother's voice. Summery air threaded across the back of her neck, and she felt a pull, suddenly, deep inside her. She didn't know whether it was being here, in this place, or the beautiful weather that evoked long childhood days in which the hours stretched away to be filled only with pleasure, or the fact that it was Christmas Eve, or that her mother was standing here with her, solid and present in a way she hadn't been before, so that Jess was seeing her as if for the first time. But she felt a sensation in her chest that was quite the opposite of loneliness.
"Are you with me?" Polly was searching Jess's face, waiting for an answer.
Jess gave a nod and smiled. "I am.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Enormous hydrangeas with vibrant pink sponge-like blooms, rhododendrons and impatiens, tall spears of flowering oyster plants jostled together with Jurassic-looking philodendron leaves and tree ferns, a mixed bag all tied by a wild creeper with bell-shaped blue flowers. The damp smell of the garden reminded Jess of places she'd visited in Cornwall, like St. Just in Roseland, where fertile ground spoke of layers of different generations, civilizations past.
At last, beyond the tangled greenery, Jess glimpsed the jutting white chimneys of a large roof. She realized she was holding her breath. She turned a final corner, just like Daniel Miller had done on his way to meet Nora, and there it was. Grand and magnificent, yet even from a distance she could see that the house was in a state of disrepair. It was perched upon a stone plinth that rose about a meter off the ground. A clinging ficus with tiny leaves had grown to cover most of the stones and moss stained the rest, so that the house appeared to sit upon an ocean of greenery. Jess was reminded of the houses in fairy tales, hidden and then forgotten, ignored by the human world only to be reclaimed by nature.
Protruding from one corner of the plinth was a lion's head, its mouth open to reveal a void from which a stream of spring water must once have flowed. On the ground beneath sat a stone bowl, half-filled with stale rainwater. As Jess watched, a blue-breasted fairy wren flew down to perch upon the edge of the bowl; after observing Jess for a moment, the little bird made a graceful dive across the surface of the water, skimming himself clean before disappearing once more into the folds of the garden.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“There were times in a long marriage for pushing and times when the victory of getting one’s own way was not worth the price. Knowing how to tell the difference was key.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Words could be as tricky as people: seeming to say one thing, when all the while another, secret meaning lay beneath the surface.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“It's quite astonishing how children born of the same mother can be so distinct from one another. You wait and see. Just as you think you've got this mothering thing worked out, the next baby comes along and upends everything you thought you knew.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming: A Novel

“But it has been my experience that guilt shadows a person like a most reliable friend, urging them to reveal the truth when opportunity at last presents itself.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“she was the sort of person who felt other people’s unhappiness as if it were her own.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Jess liked words. She collected them. In her favorite books, it was always in words that true power lurked, whether the enchantments and curses of the fairy tales she’d devoured when she was small, or the wills and deeds and legal loopholes she’d discovered in Dickens.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“as a family they were so complete, their loyalties and grievances so tightly interwoven, that they did not easily admit outsiders. There simply wasn’t room.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“ability to self-critique was one thing, but the analysis-paralysis of overthinking was quite another.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming