“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
See more on GoodReads
“I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, quote from The Country of the Pointed Firs
“There are no truths, only stories.”
― quote from Stray
“Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of
which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and
already weary of hearing what he has never heard.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from The Everlasting Man
“Ensuring that our home planet is healthy and life sustaining is an overwhelming priority that undercuts all other human activities. The ship must first float.
Our failure to grasp these fundamental tenants of existence will be our undoing. And one thing is for certain. No calvary is going to come charging to our rescue. We are going to have to rescue ourselves or die trying.
Workable solutions are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is our elementary accord with Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms has to be revitalized and re-understood.
The burning question is, How?”
― Lawrence Anthony, quote from Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
“Слагам ръка върху тази на Диего, хваща я, както се хваща стара ръкавица. В изминалите вечери се опитвахме да правим любов, но само се прегръщахме, без да продължим нататък. Смяхме се, това се случва на свършени любовници. Едно време бях неговото момиче, сега ходи нагоре-надолу с фотоапарата си, прави любов с това, което му се случва в околния свят, като някой свещеник. После се връща у дома при своята вечност.”
― Margaret Mazzantini, quote from Twice Born
The Iron Heel
Jake Undone
A Million Dirty Secr...
The Willows
Nada
The Collected PoemsBookQuoters 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.
