Kate Morton Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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
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?

Kate Morton
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.

Kate Morton
Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It's natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.

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

Kate Morton
Sometimes, Edie, a person's feelings aren't rational. At least, they don't seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base

Kate Morton
While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

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

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

Kate Morton
She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

Kate Morton
Time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised...

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

Kate Morton
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.

Kate Morton
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
"But happiness... happiness grows at our own firesides," she said. "It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens."

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

Kate Morton
There's something about hospital walls; though only made of bricks and plaster, when you're inside them the noise, the reality of the teeming city beyond, disappears; it's just outside the door, but it might as well be a magical land far, far away.

Kate Morton
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.

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

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

Kate Morton
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
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.

Kate Morton
For home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

Kate Morton
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
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