Top 250 Kate Morton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You make a life out of what you have, not what you’re missing.”

— Kate Morton

2. “I simply love writing good stories, that’s my passion.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

4. “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.”

— Kate Morton

5. “Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.”

— Kate Morton

6. “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.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

9. “Hora pars vitae. His Latin teacher had made them write it out in lines. Every hour is a part of life.”

— Kate Morton

10. “It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, the way we throw people away?”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

14. “Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, ‘See what you can make out of these.”

— Kate Morton

15. “There is a wound that never heals in the heart of an abandoned child.”

— Kate Morton

16. “She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother’s song.”

— Kate Morton

17. “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.”

— Kate Morton

18. “Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn’t experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.”

— Kate Morton

19. “There was no such thing as the right time, he explained. Time was an idea: it had no end and no beginning; it could not be seen or heard or smelled. It could be measured, sure enough, but no words had been found to explain precisely what is was. As to the “right” time, it was simply a matter of agreeing to agree.”

— Kate Morton

20. “Don’t slide down the rabbit hole. The way down is a breeze, but climbing back’s a battle.”

— Kate Morton

21. “A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven.”

— Kate Morton

22. “A mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child.”

— Kate Morton

23. “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.”

— Kate Morton

24. “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

25. “No matter what evil might come one’s way to be loved is to be protected.”

— Kate Morton

26. “My mother was a survivor; she’s a survivor still. If I’ve inherited half her courage, I can count myself a very lucky woman.”

— Kate Morton

27. “We are all victims of our human experience,” Alice continued, “apt to view the present through the lens of our own past.”

— Kate Morton

28. “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”

— Kate Morton

29. “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.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

31. “The only thing one can count on is that no one else can truly be counted on.” Alice.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

33. “May your past be a pleasant memory, Your future filled with delight and mystery, Your now a glorious moment, That fills your life with deep contentment.”

— Kate Morton

34. “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.”

— Kate Morton

35. “If you don’t stop apologizing, you’re going to convince me you’ve done something wrong.”

— Kate Morton

36. “All human beings crave connection, even the shy: it is too frightening for them to think themselves alone. The world, the universe – existence – is simply too big. Thank God, they cannot glimpse how much bigger it is than they think.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

38. “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.”

— Kate Morton

39. “Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.”

— Kate Morton

40. “Down the winding lane and across the meadow broad, to the river they went with their secrets and their sword.”

— Kate Morton

41. “Boredom, as her mother had always told them, was a state to be pitied, the province of the witless.”

— Kate Morton

42. “Dragonflies didn’t imagine they could sense the future; they just flew about, enjoying the sun on their wings.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

45. “When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

47. “They were young; time hadn’t yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions...”

— Kate Morton

48. “Although it was almost midnight, London wasn’t dark. Cities like London never were, she suspected, not anymore. The modern world had killed nighttime.”

— Kate Morton

49. “Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.”

— Kate Morton

50. “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