Kate Morton - The Forgotten Garden (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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.

Kate Morton
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.

Kate Morton