Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Maths was the one true thing, according to Nancy. Not love? Teddy said. Oh, love, of course, Nancy said, in an offhanded way. Love is crucial, but it's an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can't be manipulated. An unsatisfactory answer, surely, Teddy thought. It seemed to him that love should be the absolute, trumping everything. Did it? For him?

Sometimes Teddy wondered if everyone had done well out of the war except for those who had fought in it.

Sister Michael turned and looked at him, and, despite her plump, jolly face, she had nuns' eyes, and nuns' eyes, Jackson knew, could see right inside your head, so he nodded respectfully at the statue. Sanguis Christi, inebria me.

She remembered holding Pamela's babies – remembered Teddy and Jimmy, too – how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be if it were her own child? Perhaps too strong to bear. Over

Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving. " 'Sacrifice,' " he remembered

how strange it was that people just kept on going, even when their world no longer existed.

Don't seek out elaborate metaphors," her English teacher had said of her school essays, but her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.

The cats are murdering sleep, the wall rumbling with their engine purrs -prut prut prut as they snore their way to oblivion.

Giselle would rouse herself from her torpor occasionally (she moved like a particularly lazy cat) in order to despise something.

Maurice had disappeared after breakfast. He was a nine-year-old boy and free to go where he pleased with whomsoever he pleased, although he tended to keep to the exclusive company of other nine-year-old boys. Sylvie had no idea what they did but at the end of the day he would return, filthy from head to toe and with some unappetizing trophy, a jar of frogs or worms, a dead bird, the bleached skull of some small creature.

Viola was a good reader, a bookworm—a phrase she hated. "How can a worm be a nice thing to be?" Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at herself for having reached such a pass. "Without worms we wouldn't be able to grow food and everyone would starve," Nancy said reasonably.

I don't actually live here, Reggie said. Who does live here then? Ms. MacDonald, except that she doesn't because she's dead. Everyone's dead. I'm not, Jackson said. You're not.

Don't you wonder sometimes,' Ursula said. 'If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in--I don't know, say, a Quaker household--surely things would be different.

A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body.

The Germans were victims of the Nazis too, but one can't say that too loudly, of course.

He had taken a few days' leave from his army training and they had taken refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel while an unexploded bomb in the Strand was being dealt with. They could hear the naval guns that had been stationed on trolleys between Vauxhall and Waterloo--boom-boom-boom--but the bombers were looking for other targets and seemed to have moved on. 'Doesn't it ever stop?' Jimmy asked. 'Apparently not.' 'It's safer in the army,' he laughed.

Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant 'See you later,' she concluded. The final irony. 'We never know when it will be the last time,' she said...

Some people were complete in themselves, as if born from the earth or the ocean, like some of the gods. Which was not a compliment. The gods were ruthlessly indifferent to humanity.

Gwendolen's mother had been a foolish woman, inclined to believe any passing nonsense. Of such people were patriots made, in Gwendolen's opinion. More's the pity.

She was real and she was dead. And she was out there somewhere.

Mrs. Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the apartment Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn't place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London.

That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) – one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one's foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward. She

Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light-

You couldn't necessarily judge a woman by the man she slept with. (Or could you?)