Top 250 Kate Morton Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.”

— Kate Morton

152. “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

153. “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

154. “A person never forgets the landscape of their childhood’.”

— Kate Morton

155. “A way of looking at you that told you she was listening, that she understood all you were saying, and all you weren’t.”

— Kate Morton

156. “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.”

— Kate Morton

157. “Some seasons later, the Princess of the kingdom was riding with her handmaiden on the edge of the dark woods. Though once she had been very ill, the Princess had recovered miraculously and was now married to a fine prince. She lived a full and happy life: walked and danced and sang, and enjoyed all the vast riches of health. They had a dear baby girl who was much loved and ate pure honey and drank the dew from rose petals and had beautiful butterflies for playthings.”

— Kate Morton

158. “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.”

— Kate Morton

159. “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.”

— Kate Morton

160. “Oh, but I do enjoy gray skies! They’re so much more complex than blue ones.”

— Kate Morton

161. “Lack of potatoes left a person’s stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul.”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

163. “Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a person’s soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it.”

— Kate Morton

164. “I don’t think I was planned exactly.” “I should say not,” he agreed. “But you were loved, which is arguably more important.”

— Kate Morton

165. “All these people, the stars of lives unfolding quite outside the sphere in which Cassandra’s own life took place.”

— Kate Morton

166. “My heart flutters a little. Or something inside my heart flutters; an artery worn so thin that a flap has come loose, is waving about, in the current of my blood.”

— Kate Morton

167. “Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open.”

— Kate Morton

168. “Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favoured memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and polished for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved below ground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.”

— Kate Morton

169. “And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understand somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.”

— Kate Morton

170. “As if I hadn’t spent a lifetime pretending to forget.”

— Kate Morton

171. “I’d pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.”

— Kate Morton

172. “To be inside, with the hope of soon being warm and dry, while rain fell outside, was a splendid, simple joy. Flames.”

— Kate Morton

173. “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.”

— Kate Morton

174. “Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.”

— Kate Morton

175. “Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.”

— Kate Morton

176. “One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.”

— Kate Morton

177. “So much in life came down to timing.”

— Kate Morton

178. “It was tiring, all that smiling and sharing and speculating about the weather, and she always left a gathering, no matter how intimate, feeling depleted, as if she’d accidentally left behind some vital layers of herself she’d never get back.”

— Kate Morton

179. “I’m good with words, but not the spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.”

— Kate Morton

180. “Hope’s one thing, expectation’s quite another.”

— Kate Morton

181. “Why did Hannah marry Teddy? Not because she loved him, but because she was prepared to love him.”

— Kate Morton

182. “Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.”

— Kate Morton

183. “She hadn’t wanted to be loved carefully, only well.”

— Kate Morton

184. “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

185. “There was no going back. Time only moved in one direction. And it didn’t stop. It never stopped moving, not even to let a person think. The only way back was in one’s memories.”

— Kate Morton

186. “We do not always have a choice in where and how and whom, and love gives us the courage to withstand that which we never thought we could.”

— Kate Morton

187. “This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade.”

— Kate Morton

188. “It’s the past. Thoughts and dreams, hopes and hurts, all brewed together, fermenting slowly in the fusty air, unable ever to dissipate completely.”

— Kate Morton

189. “They say everyone needs something to love.”

— Kate Morton

190. “People might think writing is a hard business, but it’s nowhere near acting.”

— Kate Morton

191. “She felt like a fictional character who’d escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free...”

— Kate Morton

192. “She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.”

— Kate Morton

193. “Stories have to be told or else they die.”

— Kate Morton

194. “What was real, he knew now, was the soil beneath a man’s feet. The earth, the natural world, from which could be derived every necessity. and on which were preserved the imprints of every man, woman, and child that had ever lived.”

— Kate Morton

195. “Youth is an arrogant place...”

— Kate Morton

196. “I should think less of myself if no one disliked me.”

— Kate Morton

197. “What a dignified object was a book, almost noble in its purpose.”

— Kate Morton

198. “But it was not so complicated really. Such things rarely are. It was a simple case of stars aligning; those that didn’t being nudged into place.”

— Kate Morton

199. “Life is long” was all he’d said, his voice calm; he hadn’t looked up from the film. “Being human isn’t easy.”

— Kate Morton

200. “Give someone more time and they’ll appear to have done more with it.”

— Kate Morton