Kate Morton

“And at last, the wicked Queen's spell was broken, and the young woman, whom circumstance and cruelty had trapped in the body of a bird, was released from her cage. The cage door opened and the cuckoo bird fell, fell, fell, until finally her stunted wings opened, and she found that she could fly. With the cool sea breeze of her homeland buffeting the underside of her wings, she soared over the cliff edge and across the ocean. Towards a new land of hope, and freedom, and life. Towards her other half. Home.”

“...hice las paces con Dios hace mucho tiempo. La edad es una gran moderadora. Ahora nuestra relación es cordial. No hablamos a menudo, pero sé dónde encontrarlo”

“Love, Laurel, that's the only reason to get married. For love.”

“Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!”

“She deserved a man who could offer her the best of everything, not a lifetime of butcher's leftovers got on the cheap and a drop of condensed milk in her tea when they couldn't stretch to sugar. Jimmy was working hard to become that man, and as soon as he did, by God, he was going to marry her and never let her go.”

“Who are you, Dorothy?" she said beneath her breath. "Who were you, before you became Ma?”

“It suddenly seemed to Laurel that all the absences in her own life, every loss and sadness, every nightmare in the dark, every unexplained melancholy, took the shadowy form of the same unanswered question, something that had been there since she was sixteen years old— her mother's unspoken secret.”

“A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven”

“...and time thickened so that the seconds passed like years.”

“Youth is an arrogant place...”

“And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen.”

“Es ist seltsam, aber ich sehne mich umso mehr nach dem Leben, je mehr ich davon getrennt bin. Es ist seltsam, meinen Sie nicht auch, dass Verzweiflung in Lebensdurst umschlagen kann und dass man selbst in diesen düsteren Zeiten das Glück in den kleinen Dingen finden kann.”

“Man konnte die Zeit nicht zurückdrehen, das war reines Wunschdenken, aber man konnte dem Jetzt auf andere Weise entkommen, und zwar indem man vorwärtsging.”

“Das ging ihr häufig so mit alten Fotos; sie war schließlich die Tochter ihrer Mutter, und die lächelnden Gesichter von Menschen, die nich nichts davon ahnten, was das Schicksal für sie bereithielt, hatten etwas schrecklich Ernüchterndes.”

“Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Over the course of weeks, taking great care never to revel her inward state of flux, Percy had evaluated her situation, observing her feelings from all angles before finally reaching the conclusion that she was, quite clearly, several shades of crazy.”

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

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

“... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.”

“Precisamos de memórias para manter vivo o que existiu no passado.”

“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.”

“Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.”

“It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?”

“... That was were the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.”

“How can a person expect to escape their destiny, Merry? That is the question."A silence, then a small, practical voice. "There's always the train, I guess."Juniper thought at first she'd misheard; she glanced at Meredith and realized that the child was completely serious."I mean, there are buses, too, but I think the train would be faster. A smoother ride, as well.”

“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.”

“Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?''London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.''The city still has working phone booths?''It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.”

“...as I already said, they didn't look like much--but beauty's in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?”

“The city still has working phone booths?’ ‘It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I’m in serious trouble.”

“Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.”

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

“She'd filled twelve notebooks and still she hadn't stopped. Indeed, the more she wrote, the louder the stories seemed to grow, swirling in her mind, pressing against her head, anxious for release. She didn't know whether they were any good and in truth she didn't care. They were hers, and writing made them real somehow.”

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

“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.”

“But it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred?”

“The house, she'd explained to them many times, had spoken to her; she'd listened, and it turned out they'd understood one another very well indeed. Greenacres was an imperious old lady, a little worn, to be sure, cranky in her own way-but who wouldn't be?”

“People marveled at her ability to build characters from the inside out, to submerge herself and disappear beneath the skin of another person, but there was no trick to it; she merely bothered to learn the character's secrets. Laurel knew quite a bit about keeping secrets. She also knew that was where the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.”

“The Latter, I can tell, is added for my benefit. An assumption that the elderly cannot help but be impressed by the old fashioned.”

“But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.”

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

“The event itself played over in her mind, and the role she'd taken in the police investigation, the things she'd told them - worse, the thing she hadn't - made the panic so bad sometimes that she could hardly breathe. No matter where she went at Greenacres - inside the house or out in the garden - she felt trapped by what she'd seen and done. The memories where everywhere, they were inescapable; made worse because the event that caused them was utterly inexplicable.”

“It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person's presence could be erased, how easily civilization gave way to wilderness.”

“What could be more perfect than marrying the person you love.”

“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.”

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

“They had money, but don’t you go talking about class.”

“As an only child, Cassandra found the well-worn paths of sibling interaction fascinating and horrifying in equal parts.”

“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?”