Kate Morton Quotes

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.

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.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

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.

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.

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.

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.

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

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....

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!

That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.

There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn't leave me.

Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing [as a nice safe history].

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

The Latter, I can tell, is added for my benefit. An assumption that the elderly cannot help but be impressed by the old fashioned.

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.

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.

They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions...

Csak az firtatja a jövőt, aki a jelenben boldogtalan.