Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Could you be an old maid if you had worn the scarlet letter?

He brought her a cup of tea, the first and last resource of an English husband.

His body was exhausted, but his brain had apparently discovered a secret amphetamine factory and was popping pills at will. The picture on the wall opposite his bed was

Chevaunne. C-h-e-v-a-u-n-n-e, I have to spell it every time, it's a fucking pain. It's Irish." At least the girl could spell, even if it was only her own misspelled name. Kelly Cross was so thick she couldn't even spell "Siobhan

Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.

There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn't have to have one herself.

Untouched by morning and untouched by noon, sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, rafter of satin and roof of stone.' Emily Dickinson.

The Knights' Code," which he had learned by heart from Scouting for Boys, a book he frequently turned to in times of uncertainty, even now in his self-exile from the movement, demanded that "Chivalry requireth that youth should be trained to perform the most laborious and humble offices with cheerfulness and grace." He supposed entertaining Izzie was one of those occasions. It was certainly laborious.

The gods were on the point of giving up when Brahma said, 'I know where we will hide man's divinity, we will hide it inside him. he will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within.

He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn't stop them from trying, whether it's shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated).

It was the war, Juliet thought, remembering the photograph of the flamingo's creased wife, it has made refugees of us all.

Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a raffle) where God picked out your chosen method of going—"Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let's see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?

All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders – Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge.

There's too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there's no room for the living.

She didn't feel she had the fortitude for all those Tudors, they were so relentlessly busy – all that bedding and beheading.

We could buy a sewing machine and share it," Charlene said. "We could buy cloth and spools of thread and paper patterns and spend pleasant winter evenings dressmaking together. Perhaps by the soft light from beautiful glass oil lamps. We could sit in a pool of golden light from the beautiful glass oil lamps and our silver needles would glimmer and flash as we bowed our heads to the simple yet honest work." But

She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.

Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.

Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists. When

Sylvie's children really only came into focus for her when in isolation. Together, they were an unwieldy flock, singly they had character.

Sometimes," Sylvie said, "One can mistake gratitude for love.

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

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father's brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image.