Kate Morton Quotes

we'd meet at Lyons Corner House," she whispered, hurrying

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

Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing [as a nice safe history].

It is up to you now to fill your mind with all of the knowledge that the world and its brightest scholars have acquired and published. There will come a time, I know, when women will have the same opportunity afforded men. How can it not come to pass when women are the smarter and more numerous? Until then, you must take control of your own destiny. Read, remember, think.

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.

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.

Apart from such visits, for the first time in her life Eliza was truly alone. In the beginning, unfamiliar sounds, nocturnal sounds, disturbed her, but as the days passed she came to know them: soft-pawed animals under the eaves, the ticking of the warming range, floorboards shivering in the cooling nights. And their were unexpected benefits to her solitary life: alone in the cottage, Eliza discovered that the characters from her fairy tales became bolder. She found fairies playing in the spiders' webs, insects whispering incantations on the windowsills, fire sprites spitting and hissing in the range. Sometimes in the afternoons, Eliza would sit on the rocking chair listening to them. And late at night, when they were all asleep, she would spin their stories into her own tales.

There was a strong but not unpleasant smell- moist earth, decomposing leaf matter, new flowers beginning to catch the day's sun- and great fat bumblebees were busy already collecting pollen from a profusion of small pink and white blooms. Blackberries: Sadie surprised herself by dredging up the knowledge. They were blackberry flowers, and in a few months' time the bushes would be heavy with fruit.

---All that matters to me are people and experience. Connections - that's the thing. That flicker of electricity between people, the invisible tie.

Nell was like a witch. Her long silvery hair rolled into a bun on the back of her head, the narrow wooden house on the hillside in Paddington, with its peeling lemon-yellow paint and overgrown garden, the neighborhood cats that followed her everywhere. The way she had of fixing her eyes so straight on you, as if she might be about to cast a spell.

And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen.

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

That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.

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 ...

soul it shaped. Laurel

And I thought -not for the first time- what a true and simple pleasure it was, to be inside and sated when the cold and the stalkless dark spread out across the world.

Odd snatches of memory, more like dreams.

Impending war was evidenced by the faraway expression in the older villagers' eyes, the shadows on their faces, not of fear but of sorrow. Because they knew; they had lived through the last war and they remembered the generation of young men who had marched off so willingly and never come back. Those too, like Daddy, who had made it home, but left in France a part of themselves that they could never recover. Who surrendered to moments, periodically, in which their eyes filmed and their lips whitened, and their minds gave over to sights and sounds they wouldn't share but couldn't shake.

Youth is an arrogant place...

he was a man on a date with destiny,

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.

Murder in and of itself was not engaging; it was the drive to kill, the human factor, the fervors and furies motivating the dreadful act that rendered it compelling. Alice

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.

It was true what people said, that when one became old (and how sneakily that happened, how sly time was), memories of the long-ago past, repressed for decades, were suddenly bright and clear. A

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

Better to makes changes for oneself that try to mend holes torn by the decisions of others.

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!

There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn't leave me.

Sunlight was everywhere, glittering gold off the bright green leaves of the garden. A blackcap, concealed within the foliage of a nearby willow, sang a sweet fanfare and a pair of mallards fought over a particularly juicy snail. The orchestra was rehearsing a dance number and music skimmed across the surface of the lake. How lucky they were to get a day like this one! After weeks of agonizing, of their studying the dawn, of consulting Those Who Ought to Know, the sun had risen, burning off any lingering cloud, just as it should on Midsummer's Eve. The evening would be warm, the breeze light, the party as bewitching as ever.

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.

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

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.

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.

All her life, Alice had been interested in people. She didn't always like them, she rarely sought their company for reasons of social fulfillment, but she did find them fascinating. And there was nowhere better for seeing people than in the rabbit warrens of the Underground. All of London passed through those tunnels, a steady flow of humanity in its many weird and wonderful forms, and among them Alice slipped like a ghost.

gaol of her closed bedroom door. 'I was only

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

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.

He was a scribble of a man.

The sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to anything beyond explanation.

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

She told me she believes that sometimes she comes close to waking; if she sits very, very still, she says she can glimpse beyond the veil; she can see and hear her family going about their usual business, oblivious to her standing on the other side, watching them. At least now I understand why the child exhibits such a profound quiet and stillness.

People value shiny stones and lucky charms, but they forget that the most powerful talismans of all are the stories that we tell to ourselves and to others.

Life was like that, doors of possibility constantly opening and closing as one blindly made one's way through.

The cage door opened and the cuckoo bird fell, fell, fell, until finally her stunted wings opened, and she found that she could fly.

Mrs. Bird smiled at me as I arrived at her side. "They can surprise us, can't they, our parents? The things they got up to before we were born."
"Yes," I said. "Almost like they were real people once.

So much in life came down to timing.

I have come to understand that loss leaves a hole in a person and holes like to be filled. It is the natural order.

who does any unauthorized act in relation

I learned long ago that silence invites all manner of confidences.

Weary of knowing too much and understanding too little.

I was pulled back together by the arrival of my first visitor. And as my name, my life, my history was buried, I who had once dreamed of captured light found that I had become captured light itself.

It was just the same as spotting the scaffolding in other writers' books. Awareness of construction didn't diminish her pleasure, only added to it.

But there is a difference between enjoying someone's company, thinking them attractive, and finding oneself helplessly in love.

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.

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.

A tangle of star jasmine spilled across the path and Alice knelt to pluck a sprig, holding it beneath her nose and breathing in the scent of captured sunshine. On a whim, she unlaced her shoes. A delicate iron chair stood in a nook beside the camellia, and she sat, slipping her feet free and peeling off her socks, wiggling her toes in the surprise of the balmy air. A late butterfly hovered at a nearby rosebush, and Alice thought, as always, of her father.

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

...home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess.

And time thickened so that the seconds passed like years.

True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.

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?

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

Our hands meet for an instant and she withdraws quickly, frightened she might catch something. Old age perhaps.

Like faint flowers in the diaphonous fabrics of the twenties: beautiful, trivial fabrics so flimsy they could not hope to last?

Oh, but I do enjoy gray skies! They're so much more complex than blue ones.

she abhorred the expression Everything happens for a reason. Certainly there were consequences to everything that happened, but that was an entirely different prospect.

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

The Latter, I can tell, is added for my benefit. An assumption that the elderly cannot help but be impressed by the old fashioned.

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

Love is like that: insistent, sure, persuasive. It silences easily all whispers of misgiving.

The wedding photographs were stained with black umbrellas.

Without thinking twice, he'd lifted his hand, still clutching the penknife, and drawn it swiftly along her milky skin, made his pain her own . . .

The simplest falsehoods are the strongest.

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.

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

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

This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade.

She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realized. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, she'd been made to function best at a certain tuning.

She wanted you to move forward without regrets, not to deny the past entirely.

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.

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.

Don't slide down the rabbit hole. The way down is a breeze, but climbing back's a battle.

He was aware as he walked of belonging; in an essential way he knew himself to be of the earth, and with each footstep he drew further solidity from it. Belonging. The word lodged in his mind, and when he resumed his travels that afternoon he found his feet moving to the rhythm of its syllables.

You will know your job is done well when it goes unnoticed, that you have succeeded when you are unnoticed.

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

If she didn't learn to stop her mind racing on ahead of her she'd end up running into a mountain made of her own imaginings.

Her eyes, though tired, had the glint of one who never stopped expecting to be amused, and her mouth turned up at the corners as if she'd just remembered a joke. It was the sort of face that drew strangers , that enchanted them and made them want to know her better. The way she had of making you feel, with a slight twitch of the jaw, that she had suffered as you did, that everything would be better now simply for having come within her orbit: that was her real beauty - her presence, her joy, her magnetism. That, and her splendid appetite for the make-believe.

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

The world was a bubble now, thin and glistening, and everyone else had found their way inside. But Leonard was too heavy for the bubble. He was a man out of time: too old to be one of the spirited young people and too young to fit in with the hopeless drunkards who lined the river. He felt a connection to nothing and to nobody.

Poisons are more my thing

It was madness, it was possession, it was desire. Most of all, though, it was love.

We do not always have a choice in where and how and whom, and love gives us the courage to withstand that which we never thought we could.

sunlight had made shards of glass in the ruins glitter and sparkle,

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

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant.

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

There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it.

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

Like the kaleidoscope in the nursery that had so delighted her when she first came to Blackhurst, one twist and the same pieces were rearranged to create a vastly different picture.

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