“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“...when you love someone you’ll do just about anything to keep them.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I'd been missing.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“Rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“She hadn't wanted to be loved carefully, only well.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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, quote from The Distant Hours
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“They say everyone needs something to love.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“Quite simply the book and I were meant to be together.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“The stretch of years leaves none unmarked: the blissful sense of youthful invincibility peels away and responsibility brings its weight to bear.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“Nighttime is different. Things are otherwise when the world is black. Insecurities and hurts, anxieties and fears grow teeth at night.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“I am not a storyteller . . . not like the others. I only have one tale to tell.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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 sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions...”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she'd run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Distant Hours
“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, quote from The Distant Hours
Kate Morton
Born place: Berri, Australia
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“Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Cryptonomicon
“Miss Lark had two gates. One was for Miss Lark’s friends and relations, and the other for the Butcher and the Baker and the Milkman. Once the Baker made a mistake and came in through the gate reserved for the friends and relations, and Miss Lark was so angry that she said she wouldn’t have any more bread ever.”
― P.L. Travers, quote from Mary Poppins
“How long did you want me to stay?”
“Forever.”
― Sylvain Reynard, quote from Gabriel's Inferno
“I don’t know a soul who couldn’t see a fool jest by lookin’ in the glass. I been one myself, once’t or twice’t. So hesh up now. Cryin’ ain’t go’n do no good.”
― Olive Ann Burns, quote from Cold Sassy Tree
“Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say”
― Richard Yates, quote from Revolutionary Road
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Black and BlueBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
