Kate Lord Brown > Quotes

“Perfume is the key to our memories”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“Your home is within you, you carry your place in the world.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“The end is never the end. It's always the the beginning of something.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“Change is the one sure thing in life”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“You'd think they would train these SOE girls better, it's just sloppy.' Hans sipped his cognac. 'She looked the wrong way crossing the road, silly girl.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Beauty Chorus

“There are few things emptier than the space where a Christmas tree used to be.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The House of Dreams

“Would you rather die like a hero or live like a coward?”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“She lies with me, and I am home. I am filled with so much joy I could fly right up there above the beach, the sea, our world, with her. I can’t bear it, it is so beautiful.
It all falls away.
I loved, I am love, I am free.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The House of Dreams

“I am an ordinary woman who did extraordinary things. The first to qualify as a ground engineer. The first to fly to Australia single-handed. A million people lined the streets of London when I came home. I waved to them from an open-topped car like the queen, the queen of the air.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Beauty Chorus

“Every flight is a gamble. If we don’t smash into a cloud bound hillside, we might be picked off like a defenceless lamb by a lone wolf Messerschmitt with a gaping maw painted on its fuselage.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Beauty Chorus

“My whole life, I’ve felt I was homesick for somewhere I’d never known.’ She told me that in Britain, where she grew up, the Celts called it ‘hiraeth’—a longing for home.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“That my life has come down to this – luck, is galling, when I have always directed my own fate. Land or water? Heads or tails? Life or death? We’ll see.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Beauty Chorus

“If you ride the bucking peaks and troughs of celebrity long enough you become a national treasure. If you have the sense to die in mysterious circumstances you become a legend”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Beauty Chorus

“Roots and wings, Em,” she remembered her mother saying. “That’s what you give your children.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“You know what they say,' Juno said, walking on, Cairo has the novelty of Paris, the charm of Vienna and the nobility of Istanbul. Something for everyone.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Golden Hour

“We are the libraries of the world, with stories to tell.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Golden Hour

“What I’ve learnt is: buy the damn shoes. Kiss the boy. You can lose a life in indecision, and regret is a waste of an emotion.”
― Kate Lord Brown, A Summer at the Castle

“People need things like perfume and poetry, music and art more than ever during times like this. People need to remember the simple joys in life. If you forget, if life loses its color then they have won. Those cowardly, heartless bastards have won.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“That’s what great art does—that’s why these men and women counted. It shows us what makes life worth living.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The House of Dreams

“Nothing matters more than the love we leave behind.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The House of Dreams

“I’ll never forget what she said to me about having a baby. She said that she would wake in the morning to my cries, and wonder how she would get through another day. Perhaps Freya wasn’t a natural mother—some women aren’t, I suppose, and it can’t have been easy for her.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“Freya, I killed a man.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“Never let your capacity for love be diminished by the actions of others.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“It was and it was not so... To begin a tale like that is more truthful than 'once upon a time', for every story is told slant. No event is seen the same way by two people. No story is entirely true. Memory is slippery creature - the past shifts and rearranges like the glass beads of a kaleidoscope.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Golden Hour

“The hillside blushed rose around them, the earth salmon pink, umber, peach, dotted with sage green and silver trees, dusted with white powder like the cheek of a courtesan.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“I was looking into scent scales on butterfly wings at first--- you know they release chemicals, pheromones, to attract females?"
Charles had explained his theories a hundred times, but Emma humored him. "It sounds fascinating, Uncle Charles."
"Not bad for little creatures who weigh the same as two rose petals and only live for a matter of days.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“As her mother hugged her, Emma breathed in the scent of her perfume. Roses--- Liberty always smelled like a rose garden in full bloom to her: warm, sunlit, a pure soliflore.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“Duende rose from the bowels of the earth, forked like electricity through the notes, the voice, her limbs. As the music flowed, she lost herself. It was always like this. This was a dance that was in her blood, her bones. She had performed so many times, in the caves with her family. She had danced in the shadow of the Alhambra for Lorca. Her hand snaked above her, like vines. She remembered him reciting, an incantation, how even the wind seemed green, how the branches came alive. Her feet pounded like thunder, her dress whipping through the air. She danced as she had for Picasso in the Albaicin, as she had for Jordi, in the firelight, on their last night together in the ruins at Sagunto. There she had felt the warmth of the ancient stones answer the life in her limbs. That had been her greatest dance, she knew, her passion, her love, drawing the spirits of the earth, the ghosts from the ruins.”
― Kate Lord Brown, The Perfume Garden

“Brillat-Savarin, said: ‘Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.’ He had it wrong. It’s not just what we eat that shows who we are, it’s what we buy but don’t eat that says more about the people we think we are. Or want to be. Look at the ingredients in your cupboards. All those hopes and dreams.”
― Kate Lord Brown, A Summer at the Castle

“There is a magic in distance. Look back at the golden lamp-lit rooms of your home from the road of your life, and it all for a moment is exactly how you hoped it would be: warm, peaceful, safe.”
― Kate Lord Brown, A Summer at the Castle