Kate Atkinson Quotes

It's funny, isn't it, " Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

Pamela produced placid babies. "They don't tend to turn feral until they're two, " she said.

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness

Oh, man, ‘the nursery, ’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids, ” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.

Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.

Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing.

The only time you were safe was when you were dead.

What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we're all dead.

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?

She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

Pam wasn't what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.