Kate Morton Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

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

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

Kate Morton
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.

Kate Morton
Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.

Kate Morton
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.

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

Kate Morton
That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.

Kate Morton
Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!

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

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

Kate Morton
Which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?

Kate Morton
The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden

Kate Morton
She'd slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she'd been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained.

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

Kate Morton
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.

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

Kate Morton
She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

Kate Morton
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.

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

Kate Morton
You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor." "I don't want to survive it." "I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice...

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

Kate Morton
The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.

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