Top 250 Kate Morton Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “How was a boy who’d tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?”

— Kate Morton

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Kate Morton

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “Ah, well. Life’s too short for moderation, wouldn’t you say?”

— Kate Morton

116. “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.”

— Kate Morton

117. “A tangle of star jasmine spilled across the path and Alice knelt to pluck a sprig, holding it beneath her nose and breathing in the scent of captured sunshine. On a whim, she unlaced her shoes. A delicate iron chair stood in a nook beside the camellia, and she sat, slipping her feet free and peeling off her socks, wiggling her toes in the surprise of the balmy air. A late butterfly hovered at a nearby rosebush, and Alice thought, as always, of her father.”

— 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. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

122. “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

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. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Kate Morton

134. “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

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

— Kate Morton

136. “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

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

— Kate Morton

138. “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

139. “I love the structural part of the writing process.”

— Kate Morton

140. “She’d forgotten love could be like that, simple and easy and joyous. The love she felt for Anthony had deepened over the decades, and it had changed; life had thrown the pair of them challenges and love had adapted to meet them. Love had come to mean putting someone else first, sacrificing, keeping the patched-up ship from sinking in the storms.”

— Kate Morton

141. “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

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

— Kate Morton

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

147. “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

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

— Kate Morton

149. “Children were much braver than they were given credit for. She said that childhood was a frightening time and that hearing scary stories was a way of feeling less alone.”

— Kate Morton

150. “When Anthony graduated from his preclinical training with first-class honors and a university medal, it was Mr. Llewellyn he invited to sit beside Eleanor and his parents to watch him receive his degree. As the vice chancellor delivered his rousing speech about manhood and duty – “If a man cannot be useful to his country, he is better dead” – Mr.”

— Kate Morton