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Quite simply the book and I were meant to be together.
Kate Morton -
...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.
Kate Morton
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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.
Kate Morton -
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.
Kate Morton -
If you don't stop apologizing, you're going to convince me you've done something wrong.
Kate Morton -
Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .
Kate Morton -
... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.
Kate Morton -
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.
Kate Morton
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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!
Kate Morton -
Time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised.
Kate Morton -
Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.
Kate Morton -
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.
Kate Morton -
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.
Kate Morton -
...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?
Kate Morton
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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.
Kate Morton -
But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.
Kate Morton -
She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.
Kate Morton -
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.
Kate Morton -
Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.
Kate Morton -
Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.
Kate Morton
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Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.
Kate Morton -
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.
Kate Morton -
It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.
Kate Morton -
Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.
Kate Morton