Kate Morton quotes:

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I love the structural part of the writing process.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

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

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

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.

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

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.

It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.

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

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

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

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

A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven

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

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

Adults werenâ??t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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....

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.

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

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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...

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.

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

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

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.

So much in life came down to timing.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

There were two now where they had been three. David's death had dismantled the triangle, and an enclosed space was now open. Two points are unreliable; with nothing to anchor them, there is nothing to stop them drifting in opposite directions. If it is string that binds, it will eventually snap and the points will separate; if elastic, they will continue to part, further and further, until the strain reaches its limit and they are pulled back with such speed that they cannot help but collide with devastating force.

They say everyone needs something to love.

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

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

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.

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.

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

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

When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

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

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.

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...

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

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

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