“It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“A true friend is a light in the dark. Viven”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“What could be more perfect than marrying the person you love.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?'

'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.'

'The city still has working phone booths?'

'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“She was the sort of person who needed to be kept happy, he realized. Not as a matter of selfish expectation, but as a simple fact of design; like a piano or a harp, she'd been made to function best at a certain tuning.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“But it is human, is it not, to long for that from which we are barred?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“... people who'd led dull and blameless lives did not give thanks for second chances.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“There were moments in which a person reached a crossroads, when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life's events.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“And as the train whistled its imminent departure, a small girl wearing neat plaits and someone else's shoes climbed its iron stairs. Smoke filled the platform, people waved and hollered, a stray dog ran barking through the crowds. Nobody noticed as the little girl stepped over the shadowed threshold; not even Aunt Ada, who some might've expected to be sheperherding her orphaned niece towards her uncertain future. And so, when the essence of light and life that had been Vivien Longmeyer contracted itself for safekeeping and disappeared deep inside her, the world kept moving and nobody saw it happen.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“To be faced with danger and find oneself fearless was thrilling.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Love, Laurel, that's the only reason to get married. For love.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“It was safe to say that neither had ever known the other sort of love, the sort with fireworks and racing hearts and physical desires.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“people change as they get older....grow wiser, make better decisions...i am very old,Laurel. Anyone who lives as long as I have can't help but collect regrets along the way....things they did in the past...things they wish they'd done differently.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Youth is an arrogant place...”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“...how ugly adults could be, how weak. So used to getting what they wanted that they didn't know the first thing about being brave.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“. . . companions were to be valued, wherever one found them.”
― Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

“...and time thickened so that the seconds passed like years.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“... That was were the real people were found, hiding behind their black spots.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person's presence could be erased, how easily civilization gave way to wilderness.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Laurel wondered whether perhaps a person reached an age when so much was kept from them, so many details of life discussed and decided elsewhere,misheard or misunderstood, that to be surprised was no longer disconcerting.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“She deserved a man who could offer her the best of everything, not a lifetime of butcher's leftovers got on the cheap and a drop of condensed milk in her tea when they couldn't stretch to sugar. Jimmy was working hard to become that man, and as soon as he did, by God, he was going to marry her and never let her go.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Her eyes, though tired, had the glint of one who never stopped expecting to be amused, and her mouth turned up at the corners as if she'd just remembered a joke. It was the sort of face that drew strangers , that enchanted them and made them want to know her better. The way she had of making you feel, with a slight twitch of the jaw, that she had suffered as you did, that everything would be better now simply for having come within her orbit: that was her real beauty - her presence, her joy, her magnetism. That, and her splendid appetite for the make-believe.”
― Kate Morton, The Secret Keeper

“Don't wait too long to realize what's important. Your family might drive you mad sometimes, but they're worth more to you than you could ever imagine.”
― kate morton, The Secret Keeper