Kate Morton Quotes

Kate Morton

Kate Morton is an Australian author. Morton has sold more than 11 million books in 42 countries, making her one of Australia’s “biggest publishing exports”. (Kate Morton Quotes)

“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
The Forgotten Garden

“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“A human being’s life and prospects must surely be improved by having a decent place to lay his or her head at night.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“A person never forgets the landscape of their childhood.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“A place is more than the sum of its physical parts; it’s a repository for memories, a record and retainer of all that has happened within its boundaries.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“A promise should never be made that one wasn’t prepared to keep.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“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
The Lake House

“A true friend is a light in the dark.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“A twinge at the edge of her lips and she continued, the soft, slow lilt of recitation: “Ancient walls that sing the distant hours.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Forgotten Garden

“Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“After all, it’s the librarian’s sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

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

“All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“An expression of infinite wisdom, as if, in those first days of life, the small person retained the knowledge of a lifetime just passed.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“And finally it seemed autumn had realized it was September. The last lingering days of summer had been pushed off stage and in the hidden garden long shadows stretched towards winter. The ground was littered with spent leaves, orange and pale green, and chestnuts on spiky coats sat proudly on the fingertips of cold branches.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“And Juniper had understood, somehow, that in Tom she’d found the person who could balance her, and that more than anything, to fall in love was to be caught, to be saved.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“Being a parent’s a breeze,” came Alan’s cheerful voice on the wind. “No more difficult than flying a plane with a blindfold on and holes in your wings.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Boredom, as her mother had always told them, was a state to be pitied, the province of the witless.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“But it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred?”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“But there is a difference between enjoying someone’s company, thinking them attractive, and finding oneself helplessly in love.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Children could be self-centred like that, especially the happy ones.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.” (Kate Morton Quotes)
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Comfort had a habit of breeding transgression.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“Creatures that grow up in the wilderness turn out wild.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Don’t wait too long to realize what’s important. Your family might drive you mad sometimes, but they’re worth more to you than you could ever imagine.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“Don’t slide down the rabbit hole. The way down is a breeze, but climbing back’s a battle.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“Dragonflies didn’t imagine they could sense the future; they just flew about, enjoying the sun on their wings.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Edward always said that painting helped to clear his mind—that without it his thoughts would drive him mad.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Even if she loathes it. To do so would be akin to denying the existence of an awkward child.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“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
The Distant Hours

“Guilty characters might escape prosecution, but they never escaped justice.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“He was far more comfortable reading about the lives and ideas of others than describing his own.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“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
The Distant Hours

“Her father had once said that the poor might suffer poverty, but the rich had to contend with uselessness, and there was nothing like idleness to eat away at a person’s soul.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“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
The Forgotten Garden

“History was about to intervene: real adventure, real escape and adulthood were lurking, laughing, round the corner”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“I am beginning to feel at home in the past and a visitor to this strange and blanched experience we agree to call the present”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“I am not a storyteller… not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Lake House

“I do not know where the likeness went. It slipped through the cracks of time and went to where the lost things are.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“I don’t have many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad and lonely way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, pages after glorious pages of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions – full of wise counsel, some of them – but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“I have come to understand that loss leaves a hole in a person and holes like to be filled. It is the natural order.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“I have learned that one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“I have lived a long time and I have learned that one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“I should think less of myself if no one disliked me.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“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 Quotes)
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“I want to be independent. To meet interesting people. … I just mean new people with clever things to say. Things I’ve never heard before. I want to be free. Open to whatever adventure comes along and sweeps me off my feet.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“I want to know how it feels to be altered by life”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“I’ve been sitting here watching the river. It never stops, you know.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“If you don’t stop apologizing, you’re going to convince me you’ve done something wrong.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“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
The Distant Hours

“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
The House at Riverton

“It didn’t occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“It felt as if the sun had gone behind thick clouds, and he glimpsed how cold it would be if her no longer had her in his life.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“It hardly needs to be said: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down…”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it’s wondrous, don’t you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“It matters not, for she did not need her eyes to tell her who she was. She knew it by your love for her.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“It was an anodyne word, disappointment, but the shame and helplessness intrinsic to it were breathtaking.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Lake House

“It was just the same as spotting the scaffolding in other writers’ books. Awareness of construction didn’t diminish her pleasure, only added to it.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physical desires.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I’d been missing.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person’s presence could be erased, how easily civilization gave way to wilderness.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things—many’s the time I saw him weep—but he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief; he picked himself up and went on, every time. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognize adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The Lake House

“It’s not easy, getting old, feeling one’s relevance slip away.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“It’s only with age I have learned solely to listen to things I want to hear.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

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

“It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, the way we throw people away?”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“I’ve heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Lack of potatoes left a person’s stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“Laurel wondered whether perhaps a person reached an age when so much was kept from them, so many details of life discussed and decided elsewhere, misheard or misunderstood, that to be surprised was no longer disconcerting.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Life was like that, doors of possibility constantly opening and closing as one blindly made one’s way through.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“Life wasn’t a fairy tale and there were instances when one couldn’t have everything one wanted, not at the same time.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“Life’s only nod to fairness was the blindness with which it dealt unfair blows.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Love affairs, in their beginnings, are all about the present. But there is a point in each-an event, an exchange, some other unseen trigger-which forces the past and the future back into focus.” (Kate Morton Quotes)
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Love keeps no record of wrongs.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“Love, Laurel, that’s the only reason to get married. For love.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“Make sure you write it all down, now. Everything you see and think and feel. Your voice is your own, it matters.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“May your past be a pleasant memory, your future filled with delight and mystery, Your now a glorious moment, That fills your life with deep contentment.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“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
The Forgotten Garden

“My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“My mother was a survivor; she’s a survivor still. If I’ve inherited half her courage, I can count myself a very lucky woman.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Lake House

“Never discount the possibility of turning up an answer none of the current theories predicts.
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“No matter how hard a person ran, no matter how fresh the start they gave themselves, the past had a way of reaching across the years to catch them.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“No matter what evil might come one’s way to be loved is to be protected.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don’t approximate. Don’t settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“One must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The Secret Keeper

“Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, ‘See what you can make out of these.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“People value shiny stones and lucky charms, but they forget that the most powerful talismans of all are the stories that we tell to ourselves and to others.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The Distant Hours

“Perhaps all children were held captive, in some part, by their parents’ pasts.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Place is a doorway through which one steps across time.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Quite simply the book and I were meant to be together.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Lake House

“Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“She chased across her memories to recall what had been said.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“She doesn’t know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“She either confused me with a much older child or else she glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I’ve always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it’s the librarian’s sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Secret Keeper

“She had found there were very few genuinely dull people; the trick was to ask them the right questions.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“She hadn’t wanted to be loved carefully, only well.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Distant Hours

“She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother’s song.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“She wanted you to move forward without regrets, not to deny the past entirely.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“She was the breeze on a summer’s day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realized. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, she’d been made to function best at a certain tuning.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“She wasn’t sure exactly, but she’d known it absolutely: there was more to life, and it was waiting for her.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Lake House

“She’d slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she’d been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried to grasp them. Only the tendrils of discomfort remained.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“Some nights she lay awake wondering how she could best divide her lifetime: there simply wasn’t enough of it for a person to ensure that they learned everything they wished to know.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Something inside Dolly curled up and died. Things could not have been worse. Except that suddenly they were.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Lake House

“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 Quotes)
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Sometimes you can tell just by looking at a door that there’s something interesting behind it.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Distant Hours

“Stories have to be told or else they die.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“That was the nature of history, of course, notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“The camera is ubiquitous. They all carry one now. Even as I watch, they traipse through the rooms of the house, pointing their devices at this chair or those tiles. 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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“The canopy of the woods was spread out beneath me and it looked as if autumn had taken a great torch to the trees, burnishing them gold, red, and bronze.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly…It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“The house remembered her. Laurel did not consider herself a romantic, but the sense was so strong that for a moment she had no trouble believing that the combination before her of wooden boards and red chimney bricks, or dappled roof tiles and gabled windows at odd angles, was capable of remembrance.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“The landscape of one’s childhood was more vibrant than any other. It didn’t matter where it was or what it looked like, the sights and sounds imprinted differently from those encountered later. They became part of a person, inescapable.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“The single static note amidst the swirl of activity was Grandmother deShiel, who sat small and hunched on the cast-iron garden seat outside the library, lost in her cobwebbed memories and completely oblivious to the round glass lanterns being strung up in the trees around her”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“The transfer of an idea? And, of course, a story is not a single idea; it is thousands of ideas, all working together in concert.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“The woman in whose body I had grown, in whose house I’d been raised was, in some vital ways, a stranger to me. I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl with the pasted on smiles and the folding tab dresses.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“The world was an awfully large place and it wasn’t easy to find a person who’d gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“There are limited ways to say the same thing over and over again, and I’m afraid it had become a rather tedious task.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“There are very few certainties in this world, Mr. Gilbert, but I will tell you something I know: the truth depends on who it is that’s telling the story.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“There is a wound that never heals in the heart of an abandoned child.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“There was a lid for each pot, she’d told me often and soberly, and she thanked God she’d found her lid in my grandfather.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“There was a pessimism in his soul, a darkness in his outlook, that always left her somehow more aware of hard edges than she had been before.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Lake House

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“There was no such thing as the right time, he explained. Time was an idea: it had no end and no beginning; it could not be seen or heard or smelled. It could be measured, sure enough, but no words had been found to explain precisely what is was. As to the “right” time, it was simply a matter of agreeing to agree.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“There was nowhere farther from home than the battlefield, and no more wretched homesickness than that of the soldier facing death.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn’t leave me.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“There were moments in which a person reached a crossroads, when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life’s events.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“There were two now where they had been three. David’s death had dismantled the triangle, and an enclosed space was now open. Two points are unreliable; with nothing to anchor them, there is nothing to stop them drifting in opposite directions. If it is string that binds, it will eventually snap and the points will separate; if elastic, they will continue to part, further and further, until the strain reaches its limit and they are pulled back with such speed that they cannot help but collide with devastating force.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“There’s something about hospital walls; though only made of bricks and plaster, when you’re inside them the noise, the reality of the teeming city beyond, disappears; it’s just outside the door, but it might as well be a magical land far, far away.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“They say everyone needs something to love.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“They were young; time hadn’t yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“Those who live in memories are never really dead.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“Those who seek to know gossip will hear ill about themselves.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Time is a strange and powerful beast. It has a habit of making the impossible possible.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“To be faced with danger and find oneself fearless was thrilling.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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
The Forgotten Garden

“To hear years of one’s life, one’s passion, described so casually, relegated so absolutely to the past, was breathtaking.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“True fear is indelible; the sensation does not recede, even when the cause is long forgotten. It is a new way of seeing the world: the opening of a door that can never be closed again.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn’t flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.”
Kate Morton
The House at Riverton

“We are all victims of our human experience,” Alice continued, “apt to view the present through the lens of our own past.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“We are traveling each towards his sunset.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The Lake House

“We’re all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“What a dignified object was a book, almost noble in its purpose.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“What could be more perfect than marrying the person you love.”
Kate Morton
The Secret Keeper

“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 Quotes)
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“When you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“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
The Clockmaker’s Daughter

“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
The House at Riverton

“You always presume there’s time ahead, until one day you realize there isn’t.”
Kate Morton
The Lake House

“You make a life out of what you have, not what you’re missing.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden

“You must feel as if they’re still around you singing in the walls.”
Kate Morton
The Distant Hours

“You must learn to know the difference between tales and the truth, my Liza, she would say. Fairy tales have a habit of ending too soon. They never show what happens afterwards when the prince and princess ride off the page.”
Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden