Kate Morton Quotes
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.
It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.
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'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.
I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .
The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.
After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.
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
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
Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.
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.
But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.
Nature is cruel. Isn't that right, Daddy? Every living thing has to die. And they're still beautiful. Now they'll stay that way.
What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler's Top.
Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.
That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.
...home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess.
How was a boy who'd tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?
I had forgotten, I suppose, that there were bright memories in amongst the dark.
