Kate Morton Quotations

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

I love the structural part of the writing process.

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

I simply love writing good stories, that's my passion.

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

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

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

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.

But happiness ... happiness grows at our own firesides," she said. "It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens." ~ The House at Riverton

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

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

We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.

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

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.

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.

Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.

. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.

They say everyone needs something to love.

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

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.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

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.

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.

Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night. p493

For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.

when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.

Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.

Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.

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.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?

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

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

Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.

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.

She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.

The prospect of an early death sits differently upon each person. In some it gifts maturity far outweighing their age and experience: calm acceptance blossoms into a beautiful nature and soft countenance. In others, however, it leads to the formation of a tiny ice flint in their heart. Ice that, though at times concealed, never properly melts. Rose, though she would have liked to be one of the former, knew herself deep down to be one of the latter.

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

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

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.

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...

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.

She either confused me with a much older child or else she glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I've always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it's the librarian's one sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .

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.

Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.

A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven

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

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

... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.

Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.

Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?' 'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.' 'The city still has working phone booths?' 'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

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.

It's special, grandparents and grandchldren. So much simpler. Is it always so, I wonder? I think perhaps it is. While one's child takes a part of one's heart to use and misuse as they please, a grandchild is different. Gone are the bonds of guilt and responsibility that burden the maternal relationship. The way to love is free.

Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open.

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!

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

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.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

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

So much in life came down to timing.

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

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

She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free...

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

Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.

But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.

Darling girl, blinded by foolish thoughts of love. How to tell her that the hearts of men were not so easily won. If won, rarely kept.

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

I am not a storyteller . . . not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.

When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

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.

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

Quite simply the book and I were meant to be together.

Those who live in memories are never really dead." The House At Riverton

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.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

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

Hope's one thing, expectation's quite another.

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.

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 ...

... time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised ...

Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?

Nell was not one for friends and had never hidden her distaste for most other humans, their neurotic compulsion for the acquisition of allies.

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.