“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, quote from The House at Riverton
“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, quote from The House at Riverton
“The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly...It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“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, quote from The House at Riverton
“... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“She doesn't know I cry for the changing times. That just as I reread favourite books, some small part of me hoping for a different ending, I find myself hoping against hope that the war will never come. That this time, somehow, it will leave us be.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“If you don't stop apologizing, you're going to convince me you've done something wrong.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“. . . happiness grows at our own firesides, . . . . It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“I want to know how it feels to be altered by life”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“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, quote from The House at Riverton
“While I wasn't certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“But in my humble opinion, a house needs a good party once in a while; remind folks it exists.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“I want to be independent. To meet interesting people. ... I just mean new people with clever things to say. Things I've never heard before. I want to be free. Open to whatever adventure comes along and sweeps me off my feet.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“It hardly needs to be said: sooner or later secrets have a way of making themselves known.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“But happiness ... happiness grows at our own firesides,' she said. 'It is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“But of course, those who live in memories are never really dead”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“It's special, grandparents and grandchldren. So much simpler. Is it always so, I wonder? I think perhaps it is. While one's child takes a part of one's heart to use and misuse as they please, a grandchild is different. Gone are the bonds of guilt and responsibility that burden the maternal relationship. The way to love is free.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“I am beginning to feel at home in the past and a visitor to this strange and blanched experience we agree to call the present”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
“Creatures that grow up in the wilderness turn out wild.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The House at Riverton
Kate Morton
Born place: Berri, Australia
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“...the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whaterver form. Both are illusions.”
― Eckhart Tolle, quote from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
“Women often seemed to leave things unsaid, and in his limited experience it was what they did not say that proved the most trouble.”
― Robert Jordan, quote from The Great Hunt
“i wish the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from The Dharma Bums
“In this, with him... I'm as close to the sky as I've ever been.”
― Sophie Jordan, quote from Firelight
“It’s time to quit fucking around, don’t you know that? When you start to see colored footprints on the sidewalk, it’s time to quit fucking around and go to the doctor.”
― Stephen King, quote from Insomnia
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