“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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“When you spend your whole life faking happiness, it becomes a second emotion.”
― Jay McLean, quote from Kick, Push
“We will love her, protect her, all of us--Bisaya, Tagalog, Ilokano, so many islands, so many tribes--because if we act as one, we will be strong and so will she be. Alone you will fall prey to every marauder that passes by. I am not asking that you love Filipinas. I am asking that you do what is right, what is duty..."
-The Cripple”
― F. Sionil José, quote from Dusk
“with their mouth open they’ll eat an average of five spiders a night, which is kind of believable if you think about it. Another time Rodrick told me that it’s dangerous to wake someone up when they’re sleepwalking. I thought there could be a chance he was actually telling the truth, because I’m pretty sure I heard that one somewhere else. ZZZZZ”
― Jeff Kinney, quote from Double Down
“I get it now. God, Ryder. Why do you have to be so perfect?”
“Perfect? I’ve been in love with you for so long now, and I’ve never managed to get it right, not once.”
I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning. “News flash--I think you’ve finally got it this time.”
His smile makes my heart leap. “Do you have any idea what was going through my head when you first told me about NYU? I couldn’t believe it. It was like…like a gift fell right into my lap. Like winning the lottery. All this time I thought going off to New York would mean leaving you behind. And now--”
“Now we both better get in,” I finish for him, though it probably wasn’t what he was going to say. I mean, he’s a shoo-in for Columbia. Perfect grades, high SATs, and a superstar quarterback the likes of which the Ivy League rarely sees. He’s every college admissions director’s dream. But me? If I get into NYU, it’ll be by the skin of my teeth. Because they want geographic diversity or something lame like that. I’m nothing special.
“Where will you go if you don’t get into NYU?” he asks.
“Where else?” I say. “Ole Miss, with Lucy and Morgan.”
“Then Ole Miss is my backup too. Here’s the thing, Jem. I’m going wherever you’re going--whether it’s New York or Oxford. I’m not missing my chance this time.”
― Kristi Cook, quote from Magnolia
“Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
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