Best 192 quotes of Kate Morton on MyQuotes

After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

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

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.

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.

A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven

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

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

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

But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .

But happiness ... happiness grows at our own firesides," she said. "It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens." ~ The House at Riverton

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

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.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.

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.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.

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

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person's soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it.

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

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

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

I love the structural part of the writing process.

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.

In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.

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.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

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.

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

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.

It didn't occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.

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

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

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.

It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I'd been missing.

I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .

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.

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.

Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.

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.

Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night. p493