Top 250 Kate Morton Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 6

101. “Free as a bird’ was the expression, and yet they weren’t free at all, not as far as Saffy could tell: they were bound to one another by their habits, their seasonal needs, their biology, their nature, their birth. No freer than anyone else. Still, they knew the exhilaration of flight.”

— Kate Morton

102. “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.”

— Kate Morton

103. “The original fib was dreary enough, the additional biographical titbits positively inane.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

105. “I have learned that one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”

— Kate Morton

106. “For the perfect gentleman was out there somewhere, waiting for her. He would be nothing like Father, he would be an artist, with an artist’s sense of beauty and possibility, who didn’t care two whits about bricks and bugs. Who was open and easy to read, whose passions and dreams brought light to his eyes. And he would love her, and only her.”

— Kate Morton

107. “Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she’d run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

109. “It wasn’t so much the discovery of a single clue, as the coming together of many small details. That moment when the sun shifts by a degree and a spider’s web, previously concealed, begins to shine like fine-spun silver. Because suddenly Sadie could see how it all connected and she knew what had happened that night.”

— Kate Morton

110. “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.”

— Kate Morton

111. “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.”

— Kate Morton

112. “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

113. “Die Fotografie ist eine grausame Kunst. Sie zerrt eingefangene Momente in die Zukunft, Momente, die in der Vergangenheit haetten verpuffen sollen. Fotos zwingen uns, Menschen zu sehen, bevor sie ihr eigenes Ende kennen.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

115. “Human beings had ever been captivated by the great burning sphere in the heavens, he said, ’for not only does it give us warmth, but also light. The foremost craving of our souls.”

— Kate Morton

116. “He was far more comfortable reading about the lives and ideas of others than describing his own.”

— Kate Morton

117. “I dislike the word closure; the idea of a finite ending is all well and good in fiction, but a rather infantile expectation in this vast world of ours.”

— Kate Morton

118. “Sometimes ‘feelings’ aren’t as airy-fairy as they seem. Sometimes they’re just the product of observations we haven’t realized we’ve been making.”

— Kate Morton

119. “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

120. “He would love her with a passion that both frightened and revived him, a desperation that made a mockery of his neat dreams for the future.”

— Kate Morton

121. “I can’t imagine facing the end of the day without a story to drop into on my way towards sleep.”

— Kate Morton

122. “She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

124. “It was electric, a spark of cosmic recognition, as if in that moment time’s weave had opened and they’d glimpsed an alternative existence in which they were something more than strangers on a train.”

— Kate Morton

125. “It’s not easy, getting old, feeling one’s relevance slip away.”

— Kate Morton

126. “Curiosity was a trait with which I identified and which, in truth, had always seemed to me a prerequisite for life. What purpose could a person find in the long trudge ahead, if they hadn’t curiosities to light the way?”

— Kate Morton

127. “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.”

— Kate Morton

128. “Sadie scanned the wild tangle of greenery surrounding them. Ferns were striving towards the light, spiraled stems uncoiling into fronds. The sweet scent of honeysuckle mingled with the earthiness of recent rain. Summer rain. She’d always loved that smell, even more so when Bertie told her it was caused by a type of bacteria. It proved that good things could come from bad if the right conditions were applied. Sadie had a vested interest in believing that was true.”

— Kate Morton

129. “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

130. “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.”

— Kate Morton

131. “Guilty characters might escape prosecution, but they never escaped justice.”

— Kate Morton

132. “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

133. “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.”

— Kate Morton

134. “It was an isidious seed planted inside a person’s soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it. It was hope, too, that prevented a person taking counsel from experience.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

136. “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.”

— Kate Morton

137. “She’d opened the front cover and fallen inside the wonderful, frightening, magical illustrations. She’d wondered what it must feel like to escape the rigid boundaries of words and speak instead with such a fluid language.”

— Kate Morton

138. “There will come a time, I know, when women will have the same opportunities afforded men. How can it not come to pass when women are the smarter and more numerous?”

— Kate Morton

139. “Los cuentos tienen que contarse o acaban muriendo.”

— Kate Morton

140. “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.”

— Kate Morton

141. “I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.”

— Kate Morton

142. “There were so many aspects of Eleanor her daughters didn’t know. She took them out sometimes, those hidden traits, and turned them over, inspecting and admiring from all sides, as if they were precious seed pearls. And then she wrapped them up again safely and tucked them away. She would never reveal them again because then she’d have to explain why she’d changed.”

— Kate Morton

143. “There was nowhere farther from home than the battlefield, and no more wretched homesickness than that of the soldier facing death.”

— Kate Morton

144. “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.”

— Kate Morton

145. “A brisk wind wove through the bushes, twirling the leaves so that their pale undersides fluttered towards the sun. Like children thrust suddenly into the spotlight, flitting between nerves and self-importance.”

— Kate Morton

146. “She had found there were very few genuinely dull people; the trick was to ask them the right questions.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

148. “I had forgotten, I suppose, that there were bright memories in amongst the dark.”

— Kate Morton

149. “Those who seek to know gossip will hear ill about themselves.”

— Kate Morton

150. “To discover early that behind the black marks on white pages lurk worlds of incomparable terror, joy and excitement is one of life’s great gifts.”

— Kate Morton