Quotes by Kate Morton

Some seasons later, the Princess of the kingdom was riding with her handmaiden on the edge of the dark woods. Though once she had been very ill, the Princess had recovered miraculously and was now married to a fine prince. She lived a full and happy life: walked and danced and sang, and enjoyed all the vast riches of health. They had a dear baby girl who was much loved and ate pure honey and drank the dew from rose petals and had beautiful butterflies for playthings.

Hope, how she had grown to hate the word. It was an insideious seed planted inside a persons soul, surviving covertly on little tending, then flowering so spectacularly that none could help but cherish it.

Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.

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

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

Itll 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.

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Dont approximate. Dont settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.

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.

But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960s.

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.

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.

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

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 isnt 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.

Impending war was evidenced by the faraway expression in the older villagers eyes, the shadows on their faces, not of fear but of sorrow. Because they knew; they had lived through the last war and they remembered the generation of young men who had marched off so willingly and never come back. Those too, like Daddy, who had made it home, but left in France a part of themselves that they could never recover. Who surrendered to moments, periodically, in which their eyes filmed and their lips whitened, and their minds gave over to sights and sounds they wouldnt share but couldnt shake.

Shed slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but shed 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.

Nature is cruel. Isnt that right, Daddy? Every living thing has to die. And theyre still beautiful. Now theyll stay that way.

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....

What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smugglers Top.

Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.

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!