Kate Morton Quotes - Page 4

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

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.

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.

Time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised.

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

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?

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

When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

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.

The prospect of an early death sits differently upon each person. In some it gifts maturity far outweighing their age and experience: calm acceptance blossoms into a beautiful nature and soft countenance. In others, however, it leads to the formation of a tiny ice flint in their heart. Ice that, though at times concealed, never properly melts. Rose, though she would have liked to be one of the former, knew herself deep down to be one of the latter.

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

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.

And then he was kissing her, and she was struck by his nearness, his solidity, his smell. It was of the garden and the earth and the sun. When Cassandra opened her eyes, she realized she was crying. She wasn't sad, though, these were the tears of being found, of having come home after a long time away.

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.

Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night. p493

Those who live in memories are never really dead." The House At Riverton

Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

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

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

I love the structural part of the writing process.

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!

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.