Kate Morton

How was a boy who'd tasted poverty ever expected to choose the poorer road?

Poisons are more my thing

It's a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past, should exist only in memories glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photography forces us to see people before their future weighed down on them. Before they knew their endings.

As Linus grew into his teens, became even more awkward, with long, gangly arms and odd ginger hairs sprouting from his spotty chin, Georgiana blossomed into a beautiful child, beloved of all on the estate. She brought a smile to the face of even the most hardened tenants, farmers who hadn't had a kind word for the Montrachet family in years would send baskets of apples to the kitchen for Miss Georgiana to enjoy.

They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked having a second shadow, enjoyed showing Nell things, explaining how they worked and why. Nell was a big one for asking why-why did the sun hide at night, why didn't the fire flames leap out of the gate, why didn't the river get bored and run the other way?-and Lil loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Lil felt useful, needed, whole.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

...home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess.

They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions...

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

Every so often a reader tells me, somewhat disappointedly, that their family doesn't have any secrets. To which I always reply that of course it does, they just don't know them yet. For where there are people living in close proximity, there will always be secrets.

History in the storyteller's hand was a potent force indeed,....

Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!

That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.

Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.

What she really felt like doing was reading. Escaping into the Enchanted Wood, up the Faraway Tree, or with the Famous Five into Smuggler's Top.

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....

Nature is cruel. Isn't that right, Daddy? Every living thing has to die. And they're still beautiful. Now they'll stay that way.