Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Kate Morton

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

What could be more perfect than marrying the person you love.

Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.

Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.

He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.

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.

I want to be independent. To meet interesting people. ... I just mean new people with clever things to say. Things I've never heard before. I want to be free. Open to whatever adventure comes along and sweeps me off my feet.

... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

A way of looking at you that told you she was listening, that she understood all you were saying, and all you weren't.

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.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.

Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.

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.

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I simply love writing good stories, that's my passion.

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.

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.

Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she'd run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.

If you don't stop apologizing, you're going to convince me you've done something wrong.

Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?' 'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.' 'The city still has working phone booths?' 'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.

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.

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.

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.

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

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

Those who live in memories are never really dead." The House At Riverton

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

The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.

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.

Cassandra's grandmother smiled then, only it wasn't a happy smile. Cassandra thought she knew how it felt to smile like that. She often did so herself when her mother promised her something she really wanted but knew might not happen.

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

So much in life came down to timing.

Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?

Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.

A twinge at the edge of her lips and she continued, the soft, slow lilt of recitation: "Ancient walls that sing the distant hours.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

Quite simply the book and I were meant to be together.

It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.

Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.

Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open.