Top 250 Kate Morton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Kate Morton

52. “Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

54. “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.”

— Kate Morton

55. “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.”

— Kate Morton

56. “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.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

58. “People are fascinating, aren’t they, the closer you get to knowing what makes them tick?”

— Kate Morton

59. “Full of life and light; blissfully unaware of all the future had in store.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

62. “Die grosse, runde Bahnhofsuhr, die ueber dem Bahnstein haengt, ihr unerschuetterliches Gesicht und ihre unermuedlichen Zeiger erinnern daran, dass Zeit und Zug auf niemanden warten.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

64. “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.”

— Kate Morton

65. “After all, it’s the librarian’s sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”

— Kate Morton

66. “There are very few certainties in this world, Mr. Gilbert, but I will tell you something I know: the truth depends on who it is that’s telling the story.”

— Kate Morton

67. “To accept that life is messy and sometimes mistakes are made; that sometimes they’re not even really mistakes, because life isn’t linear, and it comprises countless small and large decisions every day.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

69. “I’m just titivating our dinner.”

— Kate Morton

70. “True fear is indelible; the sensation does not recede, even when the cause is long forgotten. It is a new way of seeing the world: the opening of a door that can never be closed again.”

— Kate Morton

71. “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.”

— Kate Morton

72. “The camera is ubiquitous. They all carry one now. Even as I watch, they traipse through the rooms of the house, pointing their devices at this chair or those tiles. Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

75. “Place is a doorway through which one steps across time.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

77. “Time is a strange and powerful beast. It has a habit of making the impossible possible.”

— Kate Morton

78. “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.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

80. “Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, s sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.” When someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.”

— Kate Morton

81. “You are in love,” he said, “for that is exactly how love feels. It is the lifting of a mask, the revealing of one’s true self to another, and the forced acceptance, the awful awareness, that the other person may never feel the same way.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

83. “Elodie was a nostalgic person, but she hated the charge. The word was terribly maligned. People used it as a stand-in for sentimentality, when it wasn’t that at all. Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or do things differently.”

— Kate Morton

84. “Her father had once said that the poor might suffer poverty, but the rich had to contend with uselessness, and there was nothing like idleness to eat away at a person’s soul.”

— Kate Morton

85. “Being a parent’s a breeze,” came Alan’s cheerful voice on the wind. “No more difficult than flying a plane with a blindfold on and holes in your wings.”

— Kate Morton

86. “We are traveling each towards his sunset.”

— Kate Morton

87. “We’re all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”

— Kate Morton

88. “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.”

— Kate Morton

89. “The transfer of an idea? And, of course, a story is not a single idea; it is thousands of ideas, all working together in concert.”

— Kate Morton

90. “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.”

— Kate Morton

91. “It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things – many’s the time I saw him weep – but he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief; he picked himself up and went on, every time. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognize adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.”

— Kate Morton

92. “The canopy of the woods was spread out beneath me and it looked as if autumn had taken a great torch to the trees, burnishing them gold, red, and bronze.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

94. “Over the course of weeks, taking great care never to revel her inward state of flux, Percy had evaluated her situation, observing her feelings from all angles before finally reaching the conclusion that she was, quite clearly, several shades of crazy.”

— Kate Morton

95. “Each clock is unique,’ he used to tell me. ‘And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals.”

— Kate Morton

96. “Some nights she lay awake wondering how she could best divide her lifetime: there simply wasn’t enough of it for a person to ensure that they learned everything they wished to know.”

— Kate Morton

97. “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.”

— Kate Morton

98. “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.”

— Kate Morton

99. “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.”

— Kate Morton

100. “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.”

— Kate Morton