The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A human being’s life and prospects must surely be improved by having a decent place to lay his or her head at night.” (The Clockmaker’s Daughter Quotes)
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Being a parent’s a breeze,” came Alan’s cheerful voice on the wind. “No more difficult than flying a plane with a blindfold on and holes in your wings.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Children were much braver than they were given credit for. She said that childhood was a frightening time and that hearing scary stories was a way of feeling less alone.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Curiosity was a trait with which I identified and which, in truth, had always seemed to me a prerequisite for life. What purpose could a person find in the long trudge ahead, if they hadn’t curiosities to light the way?”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Don’t slide down the rabbit hole. The way down is a breeze, but climbing back’s a battle.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Each clock is unique,’ he used to tell me. ‘And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Edward always said that painting helped to clear his mind—that without it his thoughts would drive him mad.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favoured memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and polished for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved below ground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Human beings had ever been captivated by the great burning sphere in the heavens, he said, ‘for not only does it give us warmth, but also light. The foremost craving of our souls.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“I do not know where the likeness went. It slipped through the cracks of time and went to where the lost things are.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“I don’t think I was planned exactly.” “I should say not,” he agreed. “But you were loved, which is arguably more important.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“I have come to understand that loss leaves a hole in a person and holes like to be filled. It is the natural order.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“I have learned that one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“I have lived a long time and I have learned that one must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“I mean that some people have a light inside them, a facility for inquiry and interest and engagement, that cannot be fabricated and cannot be counterfeited by the artist, no matter his or her skill.” (The Clockmaker’s Daughter Quotes)
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“It struck her now that maybe she needed to let go a bit more often. To try and, yes, occasionally to fail. To accept that life is messy and sometimes mistakes are made; that sometimes they’re not even really mistakes, because life isn’t linear, and it comprises countless small and large decisions every day.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“It was tiring, all that smiling and sharing and speculating about the weather, and she always left a gathering, no matter how intimate, feeling depleted, as if she’d accidentally left behind some vital layers of herself she’d never get back.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things—many’s the time I saw him weep—but he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief; he picked himself up and went on, every time. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognize adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Life is long” was all he’d said, his voice calm; he hadn’t looked up from the film. “Being human isn’t easy.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Life’s only nod to fairness was the blindness with which it dealt unfair blows.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“No matter what evil might come one’s way to be loved is to be protected.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“One must forgive oneself the past or else the journey into the future becomes unbearable.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, ‘See what you can make out of these.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“People value shiny stones and lucky charms, but they forget that the most powerful talismans of all are the stories that we tell to ourselves and to others.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Place is a doorway through which one steps across time.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother’s song.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Some nights she lay awake wondering how she could best divide her lifetime: there simply wasn’t enough of it for a person to ensure that they learned everything they wished to know.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Sometimes he simply sat with the book in his hands, marveling at its solidity and shape. What a dignified object was a book, almost noble in its purpose.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Stories have to be told or else they die.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“The camera is ubiquitous. They all carry one now. Even as I watch, they traipse through the rooms of the house, pointing their devices at this chair or those tiles. Experiencing the world at one remove, through the windows of their phones, making images for later so that they do not need to bother seeing or feeling things now.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“The transfer of an idea? And, of course, a story is not a single idea; it is thousands of ideas, all working together in concert.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“There are very few certainties in this world, Mr. Gilbert, but I will tell you something I know: the truth depends on who it is that’s telling the story.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“There is a wound that never heals in the heart of an abandoned child.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“There was no going back. Time only moved in one direction. And it didn’t stop. It never stopped moving, not even to let a person think. The only way back was in one’s memories.” (The Clockmaker’s Daughter Quotes)
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“There was no such thing as the right time, he explained. Time was an idea: it had no end and no beginning; it could not be seen or heard or smelled. It could be measured, sure enough, but no words had been found to explain precisely what is was. As to the “right” time, it was simply a matter of agreeing to agree.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“There was nowhere farther from home than the battlefield, and no more wretched homesickness than that of the soldier facing death.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Those who seek to know gossip will hear ill about themselves.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Time is a strange and powerful beast. It has a habit of making the impossible possible.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“To accept that life is messy and sometimes mistakes are made; that sometimes they’re not even really mistakes, because life isn’t linear, and it comprises countless small and large decisions every day.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“True fear is indelible; the sensation does not recede, even when the cause is long forgotten. It is a new way of seeing the world: the opening of a door that can never be closed again.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“We are traveling each towards his sunset.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“What a dignified object was a book, almost noble in its purpose.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“What was real, he knew now, was the soil beneath a man’s feet. The earth, the natural world, from which could be derived every necessity. and on which were preserved the imprints of every man, woman, and child that had ever lived.”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
“Which wasn’t to say that loyalty wasn’t important, because Elodie believed strenuously that it was; only—maybe, just maybe—things weren’t as black-and-white as she had always believed. As her father and Tip kept trying to tell her, life was long; being a human wasn’t easy. And who was she to judge, anyway?”
Kate Morton
The Clockmaker’s Daughter
