Top 250 Kate Morton Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Lil had always believed that a person’s duty was to make the best of the hand they were dealt. No use wondering what might have been, she used to say, all that matters is what is.”

— Kate Morton

203. “It struck her now that maybe she needed to let go a bit more often. To try and, yes, occasionally to fail. 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

204. “Saffy ran her fingertips lightly down the sides of the silk skirt. The color really was exquisite. A lustrous almost-pink, like the underside of the wild mushrooms that grew by the mill, the sort of color a careless glance might mistake for cream, but which rewarded close attention.”

— Kate Morton

205. “I want to know how it feels to be altered by life.”

— Kate Morton

206. “I sometimes feel my entire life is a series of accidents and chances- not that I am complaining. One can be very happy having relinquished all expectation of control.”

— Kate Morton

207. “Which wasn’t to say that loyalty wasn’t important, because Elodie believed strenuously that it was; only – maybe, just maybe – things weren’t as black-and-white as she had always believed. As her father and Tip kept trying to tell her, life was long; being a human wasn’t easy. And who was she to judge, anyway?”

— Kate Morton

208. “I love her, I love her, I love her, and if I cannot have her I shall surely go mad, for when I am not with her I fear –.”

— Kate Morton

209. “I mean that some people have a light inside them, a facility for inquiry and interest and engagement, that cannot be fabricated and cannot be counterfeited by the artist, no matter his or her skill.”

— Kate Morton

210. “Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.” Jess.”

— Kate Morton

211. “What is was to be the youngest of three – what luck to be born into a jumbly, rowdy group of bigger people and be simply adored.”

— Kate Morton

212. “People are my home, the ones I love.” Eleanor.”

— Kate Morton

213. “She took her secrets with her, into the cold earth, but I learned them in the end. I know a lot about secrets; I have made them my life.”

— Kate Morton

214. “He was aware as he walked of belonging; in an essential way he knew himself to be of the earth, and with each footstep he drew further solidity from it. Belonging. The word lodged in his mind, and when he resumed his travels that afternoon he found his feet moving to the rhythm of its syllables.”

— Kate Morton

215. “I was pulled back together by the arrival of my first visitor. And as my name, my life, my history was buried, I who had once dreamed of captured light found that I had become captured light itself.”

— Kate Morton

216. “Nana never remarried, but not for lack of offers. She was resolute: it was one thing to be a young man’s darling, she said, but she wasn’t going to be an old man’s slave.”

— Kate Morton

217. “Her ghosts had been with her, as ever, but they hadn’t sat so close.”

— Kate Morton

218. “Sometimes he simply sat with the book in his hands, marveling at its solidity and shape. What a dignified object was a book, almost noble in its purpose.”

— Kate Morton

219. “It was possible, Jess supposed, that after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.”

— Kate Morton

220. “It is a beautiful March morning. The pink gillyflowers beneath my window are in bloom, filling the room with their sweet and heady scent. If I lean close to the windowsill and peer down at the garden bed, I can see the outermost petals, bright with sun. The peach blossom will be next, then the jasmine. Each year it is the same, will continue to be the same for years to come. Long after I am here to enjoy them. Eternally fresh, eternally hopeful, always ingenuous.”

— Kate Morton

221. “There’s no point looking backward,” she’d say. “Just make a choice and then trust yourself to have chosen correctly.”

— Kate Morton

222. “I don not know where the likeness went. It slipped through the cracks of time and went to where the lost things are.”

— Kate Morton

223. “Her curiosity was unquenchable.”

— Kate Morton

224. “To hear years of one’s life, one’s passion, described so casually, relegated so absolutely to the past, was breathtaking.”

— Kate Morton

225. “I find the distant past is sharp and clear. They come often lately, those ghosts from the past, and I’m surprised to find I don’t much mind them.”

— Kate Morton

226. “Quickly and quietly, the Princess returned to the cottage, for she knew what she must do. The crone had sacrificed her eyes to provide the Princess with shelter and now must this kindness be repaid. Although she had never traveled beyond the forest rim, the Princess did not hesitate. Her love for the crone was so fathomless that if all the grains of sand in the ocean should be stacked up end to end, they would not run so deep.”

— Kate Morton

227. “It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world.”

— Kate Morton

228. “My father called me Birdie; he said I was his little bird. My real name was beautiful, he said, but it was the name of a grown-up lady, the sort of name that wore long skirts and fin silks, but had not the wings to fly.”

— Kate Morton

229. “She could stay at her own place, in her own bed, with her own books and her favourite teacup, without having to negotiate and explain herself.”

— Kate Morton

230. “Gentlemen and ladies- in green, yellow, pink- arriving on the terrace, sweeping down the stone stairs onto the lawn. Jazz music floating on the air; Chinese lanterns flickering in the breeze; Mr. Hamilton’s hired waiters balancing huge silver trays of sparkling champagne flutes on raised hands, weaving through the growing crowds; Emmeline, shimmering in pink, leading a laughing fellow to the dance floor to perform the Shimmy shake.”

— Kate Morton

231. “One step at a time,” Nora used to say if Jess suffered a disappointment at school. “Anything can be overcome, any distance traveled, just put one foot in front of the other and keep on going until you get there.”

— Kate Morton

232. “Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn’t shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender.”

— Kate Morton

233. “Hannah was still dressed in her oyster-colored silk. Like liquid. Her pale hair was pressed in waves about her face and a strand of diamonds was pinned around the crown of her head.”

— Kate Morton

234. “She found a seat in the corner and sat down, opening the cover and breathing in the glorious dusty scent of papery possibility.”

— Kate Morton

235. “Policemen grew tough skins. The job required them to confront the worst of humankind while somehow keeping enough of themselves tender to remain good husbands and fathers, decent members of society.”

— Kate Morton

236. “I felt as though I had opened the cover of a beautiful, glossy book and become lost in the magic of its story, only to be forced too soon to put the book aside. You see? Already I had fallen under the spell of the Hartford children.”

— Kate Morton

237. “The monsters pulled me under again and I heard no more. Day dissolved into night; my boat pushed out once more into stormy seas –.”

— Kate Morton

238. “There were times in a long marriage for pushing and times when the victory of getting one’s own way was not worth the price. Knowing how to tell the difference was key.”

— Kate Morton

239. “There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed. It was how people defined themselves, in a reliance upon the stories about themselves that they were told by others. Nora.”

— Kate Morton

240. “But it has been my experience that guilt shadows a person like a most reliable friend, urging them to reveal the truth when opportunity at last presents itself.”

— Kate Morton

241. “It’s quite astonishing how children born of the same mother can be so distinct from one another. You wait and see. Just as you think you’ve got this mothering thing worked out, the next baby comes along and upends everything you thought you knew.”

— Kate Morton

242. “If a woman doesn’t take herself seriously, she’ll have a difficult time convincing anyone else to bother.”

— Kate Morton

243. “Childhood is the cruelest time. A place of extremes, in which one might this day sail carefree amongst the silvery stars, only to be plunged tomorrow into the black woods of despair.”

— Kate Morton

244. “To an extent, all writers of nonfiction relied upon a palette of personal experience to animate their subjects; at what point was the line crossed and too much liberty taken?”

— Kate Morton

245. “Words could be as tricky as people: seeming to say one thing, when all the while another, secret meaning lay beneath the surface.”

— Kate Morton

246. “He gave the impression of sorrow past, deeply felt and poorly mended.”

— Kate Morton

247. “It was seven o’clock but still light, a drowsy early evening on a warm summer’s day, the sky starting to soften into the pink, purple, and gold folds of dusk, and the lower reaches of the garden just beginning to darken and cool. The colors and smells, the quality of the light, were visceral. Jess could feel them in the rhythm of her heartbeat, deep in her lungs, in the cells of her skin. She knew them as one can’t help but know the cadence of their mother tongue.”

— Kate Morton

248. “Girls had changed. They had liberated themselves from their corsets only to throw themselves at the tyranny of the “diet plan.” They were all coltish legs, bound chests and smooth scalps. They no longer whispered behind their hands and hid behind shy glances. They joked and drank, smoked and swore with the boys. Waistlines had slipped, fabrics were thin and morals were thinner.”

— Kate Morton

249. “Polly had certainly made some wrong turns – strange how easy the signposts were to see in the rearview mirror – but she had learned long ago that it was pointless to give in in to the black temptation of regret.”

— Kate Morton

250. “Edward always said that painting helped to clear his mind – that without it his thoughts would drive him mad.”

— Kate Morton