Kate Morton > Quotes

“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....”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.”
― Kate Morton , The Forgotten Garden

“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“I don’t have many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions - full of wise counsel, some of them - but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.”
― kate morton, The Forgotten Garden

“She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“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, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“...when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, ‘See what you can make out of these.”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“Those who live in memories are never really dead.”
― Kate Morton , The House at Riverton

“Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“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.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours