Kate Morton Quotes

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

— Kate Morton

“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

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

— Kate Morton

“Time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised ...”

— Kate Morton

“I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.”

— Kate Morton

They say everyone needs something to love.

— Kate Morton

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.

— Kate Morton

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

“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

“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

“She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.”

— Kate Morton

I am not a storyteller ... not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.

— Kate Morton

I want to know how it feels to be altered by life

— Kate Morton

“Lil had always believed that a person's duty was to make the best of the hand they were dealt. No use wondering what might have been, she used to say, all that matters is what is.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

“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.”

— Kate Morton

Darling girl, blinded by foolish thoughts of love. How to tell her that the hearts of men were not so easily won. If won, rarely kept.

— Kate Morton

It's special, grandparents and grandchldren. So much simpler. Is it always so, I wonder? I think perhaps it is. While one's child takes a part of one's heart to use and misuse as they please, a grandchild is different. Gone are the bonds of guilt and responsibility that burden the maternal relationship. The way to love is free.

— Kate Morton

“They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions ...”

— Kate Morton

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

“To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

“It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physical desires.”

— Kate Morton

“Weary of knowing too much and understanding too little.”

— Kate Morton

“I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.”

— Kate Morton

“And finally it seemed autumn had realized it was September. The last lingering days of summer had been pushed off stage and in the hidden garden long shadows stretched towards winter. The ground was littered with spent leaves, orange and pale green, and chestnuts on spiky coats sat proudly on the fingertips of cold branches.”

— Kate Morton

“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

“Although it was almost midnight, London wasn't dark. Cities like London never were, she suspected, not anymore. The modern world had killed nighttime.”

— Kate Morton

“Poisons are more my thing”

— Kate Morton

For the perfect gentleman was out there somewhere, waiting for her. He would be nothing like Father, he would be an artist, with an artist's sense of beauty and possibility, who didn't care two whits about bricks and bugs. Who was open and easy to read, whose passions and dreams brought light to his eyes. And he would love her, and only her.

— Kate Morton

“But there is a difference between enjoying someone's company, thinking them attractive, and finding oneself helplessly in love.”

— Kate Morton

“People aren't daft, ... give 'em a bit of love and they'll never stray.”

— Kate Morton

“She deserved a man who could offer her the best of everything, not a lifetime of butcher's leftovers got on the cheap and a drop of condensed milk in her tea when they couldn't stretch to sugar. Jimmy was working hard to become that man, and as soon as he did, by God, he was going to marry her and never let her go.”

— Kate Morton

-A noise, and the past was chased away, dispersed into the shadows like smoke by the brighter, louder present.

— Kate Morton

The Princess was never heard to complain, for she was a true Princess with a pure heart. The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe. Thus did the Princess grow up contented.

— Kate Morton

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.

— Kate Morton

“Odd snatches of memory, more like dreams.”

— Kate Morton

“Reading is one of life's great pleasures; talking about books keeps their worlds alive for longer.”

— Kate Morton

“Frailty begot frailty. Nothing caused lightheadedness so surely as day after day of stifling confinement.”

— Kate Morton

You will know your job is done well when it goes unnoticed, that you have succeeded when you are unnoticed.

— Kate Morton

“I know what it meant. I worked it out myself. I've been reading about it. It was a metaphorical death. Sometimes the cards speak in metaphors. It's me. I'm dead on the inside, I've felt it for a long time. As if I died and everything that's happening is someone else's strange and awful dream.”

— Kate Morton

It had been instant, just as she'd known real love would be. She and Shirley had stepped off the bus five Saturdays ago to find Billy and his friends smoking cigarettes on the dance-hall steps. Their eyes had met, and Laurel had thanked God she'd decided a weekend's pay was fair exchange for a new pair of nylons.

— Kate Morton

“You always presume there's time ahead, until one day you realize there isn't.”

— Kate Morton

I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn't been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn't positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained twiddling my thumbs until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn't; I maintain that I simply couldn't. Sometimes, you can tell just by looking at a door there's something interesting behind it.

— Kate Morton

“Love makes people do cruel things”

— Kate Morton

Was embarrassed; she wished only to melt into the ground. To dissolve

— Kate Morton

“Mr. Llewellyn, on the other hand, said there were worse things in life than a temper, that it only proved one had an opinion.”

— Kate Morton

“Babies in prams at the park.”

— Kate Morton

“To hear years of one's life, one's passion, described so casually, relegated so absolutely to the past, was breathtaking.”

— Kate Morton

“How bright such memories seem when the life they catalogue is threatened! Afterwards,”

— Kate Morton