Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire.

And I can't cry, I don't even want to cry. My tears would never do justice to this loss.

I dreamt of going on the stage once, he said, looking crestfallen. It's never too late, I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.

Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart.

Bridget wouldn't let Trixie come to Mrs. Dodds's house, she said she would never hear the end of it. "She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.

Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times.

The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.

Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.

I myself am usually to be found lying on the bed imitating the dead Chatterton, killing time by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds i´ve discovered so far).

After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink.

Not his real home, his real home, the one he never named any more, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution.

The mistake,' Sylvie said, 'is thinking that love equates with happiness.')

Dr. Kellet said, "it's a snake with its tail in its mouth." He nodded approvingly and said to Sylvie, "It's a symbol representing the circularity of the universe. Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.

everything was ephemeral, yet everything was eternal

Don't let your imagination run away with you, Miss Armstrong. But why would you not when the reality was so awful? And that was that. Juliet's war.

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally.

You don't see the point of English literature?' 'I don't see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?

Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. If you didn't like something you changed it and if you couldn't change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. ("Remind me not to come to you for therapy," Julia said.)

After Marlee was born they rented videos and fell asleep in front of them. Now, like so much else in Jackson's world, videos were obsolete.

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!

No woman was ever truly safe. It didn't matter if you were as tough as Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 because wherever you went there were men.

Laika," she would say, "the first dog in space. She died of heat and stress after a few hours. She was rescued from an animal center, she must have thought she was going to a home, to a family, and instead they sent her to the loneliest death in the world.

After he was born, the midwife said, "Boys wreck your house, girls wreck your head." Archie seemed intent on doing both.

More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere