Top 250 Kate Morton Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.”

— Kate Morton

152. “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

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

— Kate Morton

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Kate Morton

167. “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

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

— Kate Morton

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

174. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

178. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Kate Morton

186. “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

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

— Kate Morton

188. “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

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

— Kate Morton

190. “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

191. “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

192. “Youth is an arrogant place...”

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Kate Morton

198. “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

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

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton