“You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“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, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“It didn't occur to him that she might have chosen to remain this way. That where he saw reserve and loneliness, Cassandra saw self-preservation and the knowledge that it was safer when one had less to lose.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“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...”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“...which fairy-tale princess ever chose her maid over her prince?”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“... time had a way of moulding people into shapes they themselves no longer recognised ...”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“So much in life came down to timing.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“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.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Life'd be a lot easier if it were like a fairy tale," said Cassandra, "if people belonged to stock character types."
"Oh, but people do, they only think they don't. Even the person who insists such things don't exist is a cliché: the dreary pedant who insists on his own uniqueness!”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“He had the vague sense of standing on a threshold, the crossing of which would change everything.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“You mustn't wait for someone to rescue you, . . . . A girl expecting rescue never learns to rescue herself. Even with the means, she'll find her courage wanting.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
“Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden
Kate Morton
Born place: Berri, Australia
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“Do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of texts, by logic, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think, ‘The ascetic is our teacher.’4 But when you know for yourselves, ‘These things are unwholesome; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practiced, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them.”
― Bhikkhu Bodhi, quote from In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon
“per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number”
― Tarquin Hall, quote from The Case of the Missing Servant
“I realized that sharing does not necessarily mean the giving of money or goods; there are times that the greatest gift is to set aside one’s own troubles and listen, to care about another’s heartache.”
― Jean Sasson, quote from Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”
― Thomas King, quote from The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
“I fucking loved him and I hated it. I hated him for making me love him. I hated Kyle for leaving me alone so many nights for so many years. And mostly I just hated myself for doing this to all of us.”
― Adriane Leigh, quote from The Mourning After
A Thousand Acres
Into the Wilderness
Infinity
Snow
Cloudstreet
Circle of FriendsBookQuoters 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.
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