Kate Morton

“Nell was not one for friends and had never hidden her distaste for most other humans, their neurotic compulsion for the acquisition of allies.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The cage door opened and the cuckoo bird fell, fell, fell, until finally her stunted wings opened, and she found that she could fly.”

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

“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.”

“After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”

“. . . weary of knowing too much and understanding too little.”

“Rose sighed softly, in a way that seemed to signal a close to the conversation. "I love him, Mamma."Adeline closed her eyes. Youth! What chance had the most reasonable arguments against the arrogant power of those three words? That her daughter, her precious prize, should utter them so easily, and about such a one as he! "And he loves me, Mamma, he told me so."Adeline's heart tightened with fear. Darling girl, blinded by foolish thoughts of love. How to tell her that the hearts of men were not so easily won. If won, rarely kept."You'll see," Rose said. "I shall live happily ever after.”

“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.”

“For the perfect gentleman was out there somewhere, waiting for her. He would be nothing like Father, he would be an artist, with an artist's sense of beauty and possibility, who didn't care two whits about bricks and bugs. Who was open and easy to read, whose passions and dreams brought light to his eyes. And he would love her, and only her.”

“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Les parets estaven cobertes d'un paper que una vegada devia haver estat de ratlles blaves i blanques, però que el temps i la humitat havien tornat d'un gris brut, amb taques i tires desenganxades.”

“Jo sóc a la freda sala d'espera del temps, titil·lant mentre els vells fantasmes i l'eco de les veus es van allunyant.”

“But happiness ... happiness grows at our own firesides,' she said. 'It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.”

“Die Fotografie ist eine grausame Kunst. Sie zerrt eingefangene Momente in die Zukunft, Momente, die in der Vergangenheit haetten verpuffen sollen. Fotos zwingen uns, Menschen zu sehen, bevor sie ihr eigenes Ende kennen.”

“Die grosse, runde Bahnhofsuhr, die ueber dem Bahnstein haengt, ihr unerschuetterliches Gesicht und ihre unermuedlichen Zeiger erinnern daran, dass Zeit und Zug auf niemanden warten.”

“...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”

“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”

“We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”

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

“...when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.”

“Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.”

“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”

“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.”

“You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor.""I don't want to survive it.""I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice...”

“She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.”

“It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.”

“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.”

“Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.”

“... time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised ...”

“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 she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery ...”

“Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”

“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.”

“She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside.”

“Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.”

“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.”

“You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.”