Kate Morton

“To be faced with danger and find oneself fearless was thrilling.”

“All very well for a dull sort of girl to hitch her wheel to a man's wagon, but consider yourself warned, men enjoy a bit of sport, and they all like to catch the brightest prize, but once they do? That's when the fun and games end. His games, her fun.”

“Nachts ist alles anders. Die Dinge verändern sich, wenn die Welt schwarz ist. Ungewissheiten und Verletzungen, Sorgen und Ängste bekommen nachts Zähne.”

“Bitte nehmen sie zur Kenntnis, dass es für Niedergeschlagenheit in diesem Haus keinen Platz gibt und die Möglichkeit eines Scheiterns nicht in Betracht gezogen wird. Wir leugnen die Existenz von beidem.”

“Wenn die Vernunft schläft, kommen die Ungeheuer der Verdrängung ans Tageslicht.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...time is the master of perspective. A dispassionate master, breathtakingly efficient.”

“True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.”

“It hardly needs to be said: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known.”

“Love is like that: insistent, sure, persuasive. It silences easily all whispers of misgiving.”

“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.”

“But there is a difference between enjoying someone's company, thinking them attractive, and finding oneself helplessly in love.”

“Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.”

“Creatures that grow up in the wilderness turn out wild.”

“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.”

“Reading is one of life's great pleasures; talking about books keeps their worlds alive for longer.”

“Life is too short to read books whose cleverness makes them impenetrable. A good book should keep you awake at night, flickering through pages as you promise yourself just one more chapter; they shouldn't put you to sleep as you tackle a paragraph for the fifth time.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.”

“My cheeks burned: with disillusionment, with the feverish afterglow of confrontation, but most hotly with embarrassment. I had perceived a closeness where none existed.”

“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.”

“Odd snatches of memory, more like dreams.”

“Full of life and light; blissfully unaware of all the future had in store.”

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

“The ease I had come to expect with him had evaporated, replaced by awkwardness, a confusing tendency towards wrong turns and misunderstandings”

“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”

“My thoughts swim. Back and forth, in and out, across the tides of history”

“History was about to intervene: real adventure, real escape and adulthood were lurking, laughing, round the corner”

“Romance makes people forget themselves, do silly things”

“But of course, those who live in memories are never really dead”

“...better to makes changes for oneself that try to mend holes torn by the decisions of others.”

“Organizas tu vida con lo que tienes, no con lo que te falta”

“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.”

“I am not a storyteller . . . not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.”

“She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“People aren't daft, . . . give 'em a bit of love and they'll never stray.”

“. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.”

“They say everyone needs something to love.”

“But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .”

“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.”

“In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.”

“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.”

“When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.”

“Quite simply the book and I were meant to be together.”

“It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.”