Kate Morton Quotes
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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.
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The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.
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But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.
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After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.
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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.
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...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?
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Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.
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. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.
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He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.
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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.
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She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.
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When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.
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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.
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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.
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Cassandra's grandmother smiled then, only it wasn't a happy smile. Cassandra thought she knew how it felt to smile like that. She often did so herself when her mother promised her something she really wanted but knew might not happen.
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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.
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A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.
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Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.
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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.
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Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night.
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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 one sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.
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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.
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...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.
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Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.