The world was an awfully large place, and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

— Kate Morton

They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hug hie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Little 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 Little loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Little felt useful, needed, whole.

— Kate Morton

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

— Kate Morton

This was the power of the story weaver, Nell realized. An ability to conjure color so that all else seemed to fade.

— Kate Morton

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.

— Kate Morton

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

— Kate Morton

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.

— Kate Morton

Tragedy has been described as 'the conflict between desire and possibility.' Following this definition, is The Forgotten Garden a tragedy? If so, in what way/s?

— Kate Morton

Vivien thought 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

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. Furthermore, 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