Homecoming Kate Morton Quotes

It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world.

There's other ways to travel." She was right. He had books, and there was no barrier to the places he could visit in his own mind.

Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, s sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away," it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.

Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn't experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.

For all that "home" was considered a word of warmth and comfort, policemen knew better. Home is where the heart is, and the heart could be a dark and damaged place.

We can’t allow ourselves to be the victims of our childhoods,” she said. “One can’t blame one’s parents—or indeed one’s children—for everything. Most people do the best they can and sometimes, sadly, it’s not enough.

What is the truth anyway?" Jess had once been asked by a curious friend. "It's what happened." "According to whom?

A mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child.

It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world

Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that's happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears.

There’s no point looking backward,” she’d say. “Just make a choice and then trust yourself to have chosen correctly.

Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.” Jess

Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window. It isn’t experienced at a remove; it is internal, vital.

There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed. It was how people defined themselves, in a reliance upon the stories about themselves that they were told by others. Nora

inside their covers were whole wide worlds, filled with people and places and hijinks and humor, just waiting for him to join them.

Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.

There were times in a long marriage for pushing and times when the victory of getting one’s own way was not worth the price. Knowing how to tell the difference was key.

Policemen grew tough skins. The job required them to confront the worst of humankind while somehow keeping enough of themselves tender to remain good husbands and fathers, decent members of society.

Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.

One step at a time," Nora used to say if Jess suffered a disappointment at school. "Anything can be overcome, any distance traveled, just put one foot in front of the other and keep on going until you get there.

Jess liked words. She collected them. In her favorite books, it was always in words that true power lurked, whether the enchantments and curses of the fairy tales she’d devoured when she was small, or the wills and deeds and legal loopholes she’d discovered in Dickens.

But it has been my experience that guilt shadows a person like a most reliable friend, urging them to reveal the truth when opportunity at last presents itself.

she was the sort of person who felt other people’s unhappiness as if it were her own.

ability to self-critique was one thing, but the analysis-paralysis of overthinking was quite another.

The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.

as a family they were so complete, their loyalties and grievances so tightly interwoven, that they did not easily admit outsiders. There simply wasn’t room.

It was possible, Jess supposed, that after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.

To an extent, all writers of nonfiction relied upon a palette of personal experience to animate their subjects; at what point was the line crossed and too much liberty taken?

that after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.

And yet, there were times when she felt terror at her own desolation, the gnawing sensation of having lost something she could not name and therefore could not hope to find.

They're less careful, less capable, and yet somehow the truly terrible things never happen to them. People want to help; they attract kindness---they're looked after by guardian angels wherever they go.

Polly had certainly made some wrong turns - strange how easy the signposts were to see in the rearview mirror - but she had learned long ago that it was pointless to give in in to the black temptation of regret.

It's quite astonishing how children born of the same mother can be so distinct from one another. You wait and see. Just as you think you've got this mothering thing worked out, the next baby comes along and upends everything you thought you knew.

Ten-year-old Jess liked words. She collected them. In her favorite books, it was always in words that true power lurked, whether the enchantments and curses of the fairy tales she'd devoured when she was small, or the wills and deeds and legal loopholes she'd discovered in Dickens.

Jess and Polly stood without speaking, letting the sounds of the garden resettle. A flock of tiny fairy wrens darted busily in and around the base of a nearby plum tree, crickets ticked in the long grass, and a sense of timelessness, of nature, older and more pervasive than anything human beings and their histories could generate, grew thick and warm around them. "Shall we take a walk down together?" said Polly. Jess noticed a new note of self-possession in her mother's voice. Summery air threaded across the back of her neck, and she felt a pull, suddenly, deep inside her. She didn't know whether it was being here, in this place, or the beautiful weather that evoked long childhood days in which the hours stretched away to be filled only with pleasure, or the fact that it was Christmas Eve, or that her mother was standing here with her, solid and present in a way she hadn't been before, so that Jess was seeing her as if for the first time. But she felt a sensation in her chest that was quite the opposite of loneliness. "Are you with me?" Polly was searching Jess's face, waiting for an answer. Jess gave a nod and smiled. "I am.

She was no longer the shy girl her schoolmates had teased or ignored; conversation came naturally, he laughed easily, they ranked their five favorite Keats poems, agreeing to tie "Bright Star" and "To Autumn" for the top spot. Flowers rained down as the light breeze set them free, surrounding them in a purple haze. "La Belle Dame," he said softly, reaching to take a bloom from her hair. His expression was serious, his keen eyes studying hers. "Full beautiful---a faery's child. Have mercy on me." Polly felt something turn deep inside her, like a key in a lock, and knew that there was no way back from here.

As Mrs. Turner took what would be her last walk around the vegetable garden, Smarty, the ginger tabby, materialized to sit beside the flowerpot man, a position that afforded him a bird's-eye view of the petit fishpond. There was a larger, more formal water feature on the western side of the house, a rectangular pool with a leafy canopy above it and marble tiles around the rim, well-fed goldfish gleaming beneath glistening lily pads, but this little pond was far more cheerful: small and shallow, with fallen petals floating on its surface. The cat's focus was absolute as he watched for flickers of rose gold in the water, paw at the ready.

He felt like a character in a book. He thought of Mary Lennox as she discovered her secret garden. The blackberry bushes had become too thick to ride through and Percy dismounted, leaving Prince beneath the shade of a thick-trunked oak tree. He chose a strong whip of wood and started carving his way through the knotted vines. He was no longer a boy whose legs didn't always do as he wished; he was Sir Gawain on the lookout for the Green Knight, Lord Byron on his way to fight a duel, Beowulf leading an army upon Grendel. So keen was his focus on his swordplay that he didn't realize at first that he'd emerged from the forested area and was standing now on what must have been the top of a gravel driveway. Looming above him was not so much a house as a castle. Two enormous floors, with mammoth rectangular windows along each face and an elaborate stone balustrade of Corinthian columns running around all four sides of its flat roof. He thought at once of Pemberley, and half expected to see Mr. Darcy come striding through the big double doors, riding crop tucked beneath his arm as he jogged down the stone steps that widened in an elegant sweep as they reached the turning circle where he stood.

Enormous hydrangeas with vibrant pink sponge-like blooms, rhododendrons and impatiens, tall spears of flowering oyster plants jostled together with Jurassic-looking philodendron leaves and tree ferns, a mixed bag all tied by a wild creeper with bell-shaped blue flowers. The damp smell of the garden reminded Jess of places she'd visited in Cornwall, like St. Just in Roseland, where fertile ground spoke of layers of different generations, civilizations past. At last, beyond the tangled greenery, Jess glimpsed the jutting white chimneys of a large roof. She realized she was holding her breath. She turned a final corner, just like Daniel Miller had done on his way to meet Nora, and there it was. Grand and magnificent, yet even from a distance she could see that the house was in a state of disrepair. It was perched upon a stone plinth that rose about a meter off the ground. A clinging ficus with tiny leaves had grown to cover most of the stones and moss stained the rest, so that the house appeared to sit upon an ocean of greenery. Jess was reminded of the houses in fairy tales, hidden and then forgotten, ignored by the human world only to be reclaimed by nature. Protruding from one corner of the plinth was a lion's head, its mouth open to reveal a void from which a stream of spring water must once have flowed. On the ground beneath sat a stone bowl, half-filled with stale rainwater. As Jess watched, a blue-breasted fairy wren flew down to perch upon the edge of the bowl; after observing Jess for a moment, the little bird made a graceful dive across the surface of the water, skimming himself clean before disappearing once more into the folds of the garden.

It was a worry: ability to self-critique was one thing, but the analysis-paralysis of overthinking was quite another.

the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning,

She knew that history was cumulative. That the past was not something to be escaped from, but a fundamental part of who one was.

Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.

Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that’s happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears.” She wrapped Jess in a firm embrace. “Just remember,” she said softly, “no matter what happens, I’ll be here, and you can always, always come home.

after being responsible for another human being for so long, to be released was not to be set free so much as to be cut adrift.

...what's lawful and what's right aren't always the same...

living in the attic of her school friend’s mother’s aunt,

She’d been twenty-one, living in the attic of her school friend’s mother’s aunt, working part-time in a run-down pub near King’s Cross station.

my still point in the turning world—is my family.

She’s watched over by the angels,” Rachel had once said knowingly, when Jess described the phenomenon. Jess must have looked perplexed, because her friend went on to explain: “We all know someone like that. They’re less careful, less capable, and yet somehow the truly terrible things never happen to them. People want to help; they attract kindness—they’re looked after by guardian angels wherever they go.

Home wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away," it was "lonely." When someone said "I want to go home," what they really meant was they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.

The train ride had been smooth, and she’d arrived well ahead of time, setting herself up in the Pret a Manger near security so she could have a bite to eat before going through the rigmarole.

When someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.

Bloody internet. It’s got a lot to answer for.

There was no clear corollary between the two events, it was just a matter of coincidence and timing, and yet the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning, and so it was for Jess:

My grandmother was a girl when they planted those trees. None of the adults there that day lived to see them grow to full height. People were wiser back then, and less selfish. The understood that they were part of a line, not the beginning, middle, and end of it.

bedroom, this was the place

It wasn’t that people forgot so much as that they didn’t always remember.

But there is nothing surer than that two siblings, each nursing a problem, will seek refuge in the familiar comforts of quarreling, and so it was with John and Matilda in that moment.

C’est la vie.

[She was] A transplant to a different country, something Jess well understood: belonging, but never quite fully, while another place, far, far away, maintained a stubborn claim as ‘home.

Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity.

I cannot tell you the satisfaction one gets from having planted and loved a garden,’ she’d declare. ‘To be able to leave even a small patch of this earth more beautiful and bountiful than it was when one arrived.

A Portuguese friend had once given her the word “saudade” when she was trying to describe the feeling of being overcome by a weighty sense of absence for something that couldn’t be had or experienced again;

She planned to surround herself with animals and plants and as few human beings as she could manage.

Her mother had been right: to walk was to think, to think was to breathe, to breathe was to stay alive.

fear is the doorway to opportunity.

She began to feel contempt when she looked at his satisfied face, his rounded shoulders, the crumb in his moustache at the other end of the breakfast table.

Home is where the heart is, and the heart could be a dark and damaged place.

Her grandmother was being very kind to her, which had the effect, as kindness often does, of making Jess feel terribly sad and lonely.

For all that “home” was considered a word of warmth and comfort, policemen knew better. Home is where the heart is, and the heart could be a dark and damaged place.

yet the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning,

Then again, he had also enjoyed the benefit of having a wife to pick up the slack—and, it would seem, his wife’s sister, too.

Being old, he had come to realize, was like being stuck inside an enormous museum with hundreds of rooms, each crammed full of artifacts from the past.

This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world.

fear is the doorway to opportunity. And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that’s happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears.

had been thinking about “home” a lot. Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.” When someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.

To work for spiritual fulfillment was a luxury not afforded most people on the planet. Nonetheless, it was difficult to see that the world needed yet another puff piece on fast fashion or urban coffee trends. Jess sometimes felt that she was polluting the earth with rubbish just as surely as if she were manufacturing plastic straws.

We can’t allow ourselves to be the victims of our childhoods,” she said.

Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.” When

have been known to fall in love with buildings, but my true home—my still point in the turning world—is my family.

was

someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.

S. Eliot line about “the still point of the turning world.

finding filicide abhorrent.

As if she needed to know everything there was to know, to possess the place; as if she felt she had some right to possess it.

Reading shapes a person. The landscape of books is more real, in some ways, than the one outside the window.

I’ve always found perfection tiresome.

Jess stayed very still, waiting, hoping, trying to fall back into slumber. Just an hour or two more, and she could get up and start the day. But sleep was elusive. Lying in the dark, she felt divided, dissolvable, displaced. She pictured her bed in London and it seemed like make-believe. But this place was not right or real either.

With her long, straight, fair hair and wide, all-seeing blue eyes, there was something of the Midwich cuckoo about Evie Turner. Mr. Simon Ackroyd, the visiting science teacher, was to say of her later that he'd "rarely met a girl so eager to ask intelligent questions and so apt to make one feel a fool when seeking to give a satisfactory answer.

The netsuke in question had been Mrs. Turner's favorite. Although not as elaborate as the others, there was something beautiful about the white rabbit. Human beings are drawn to symmetry, and the small figure crouched on all four haunches was a deeply satisfying creation. "She used to say it fit perfectly in one's palm," Mrs. Pike remembered to police. "She got me to hold it once, very gently, and wrap my fingers around its smooth back, and I'll be darned if she wasn't right."

People used to say Evie was weird, but she didn't care. She said she liked weird things." This professed love of the weird might go some way to explaining Evie's particular interests in the world of fauna and flora. Not for her the "obvious" choices like koalas and kangaroos; her favorite animals were monotremes. And while she loved the smells and sights of gums and banksias and wattles, it was the primeval expanse of the forest floor that excited her. Evie was mystified when her classmates spoke of magic and make-believe, and by the stories Reverend Lawson told in church on Sundays of water turning to wine and angels appearing to men. Why, she puzzled, did people seek refuge in such fantasies, when the natural world offered endless wonder? She delighted in entering the cool, dark realm of the bush after rain, searching through sopping leaf muck to discover that a whole new variety of fungi had sprouted overnight, an array of unimaginable shapes and sizes and colors waiting to be explored and catalogued.

To describe the effect as ‘menacing’, was too melodramatic for her tastes, but there was something undeniably charged about it – secretive, even. It was the ghostly gums, she had decided, their smooth silver limbs like ladies’ naked bodies in the mist. There were eerie sites in England – the haunted cliffs and caves of Tintagel, the ruins of Ludlow Castle, Hadrian’s Wall, and Stonehenge – but their mysteriousness stemmed from their role in the human story, the crumbling vestiges of people from the past. In Australia, the strangeness came from the land itself. Its mystery and meaning existed outside language – or outside her own language, at any rate. It told its story in far more ancient ways and only to those who knew how to hear it.

He lifted his hands, indicating the garden canopy, the silver-grassed mountain on the other side of the valley, the white-trunked gums. "This is my church. My dad used to talk about places overseas, like St. Paul's Cathedral in London, the Notre-Dame in Paris---places he'd read about in books and wanted to see. But I always felt most connected when I was outside; not just surrounded by nature, but intrinsic to it, a tiny part of a system much larger than I was. Reverence. Grace. Meaning. Purpose. I feel those things when I'm working. Nature is my cathedral.

As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence. But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she'd read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like "hedgerow" and "conker," and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate "pudding" and "blancmange." And so, she had come to know another landscape, not just intellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already. Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about "home" a lot. Home, she'd realized, wasn't a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of "home" wasn't "away", it was "lonely." When someone said, "I want to go home," what they really meant was that they didn't want to feel lonely anymore.

This was jet lag, she told herself. The discombobulation, the separation of mind and body, the struggle of each to reclaim the other and together resume circadian rhythms.

The house stood high on the peninsula of Vaucluse, three stories tall with a turret on one side. It had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jess's great-great-great-grandfather arrived in the colony of New South Wales, and had been featured in several glossy books about architecture that her grandmother kept open on the display tables in the library. Inside it was entirely unpredictable: unexpected doorways led to hidden staircases that wound around brick chimneys and allowed a person to arrive in a vastly different part of the house from that which they'd left.

She was studying a nearby bush covered with vibrant yellow pompom flowers. "Wattle," he said. "Golden wattle," she corrected. "You're right." "Did you know," she began, "that the seedlings from a golden wattle can live for up to fifty years?" "That so?" "That's a long time." "It is." "How old are you?" "Younger than fifty." He was thirty-six, in fact. "Wattle seeds are germinated by bushfires." Evie Turner nodded with vague disdain toward her parents, still engaged in heated discussion in the distance. "She's frightened of bushfires. That's because she's English. But I'm not. I'm Australian and golden wattles are my favorite flower and I'm not going to live in England no matter what she thinks." With that, before Percy had a chance to tell her that golden wattles were his favorite, too, she'd run off to join the adults, sun-browned legs leaping over fallen logs with the expertise of one who seemed more familiar with this lonely place than she ought to be.

was the sort of person who felt other people’s unhappiness as if it were her own. Once,

Now, she was as likely to be overtaken with a sudden surge of alarm from nowhere. A sense that she was standing alone on the surface of life and it felt as fragile as glass. Breathing helped.