Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Right up until the end, Victor's mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there—a five-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver—would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn't lay your hands on.

Well, we all get on,' Sylvie said, 'one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there.' It

She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.

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.

Martin couldn't imagine a world where there was no time to read.

Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood

misquote Edmund Burke rather than Milton. All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing.

A van drew up in the centre of St. Helen's Square and disgorged several people dressed as zombies. The zombies proceeded to chase the men who were dressed as condoms. The condom men didn't seem very surprised, as if they were expecting to be chased by zombies. ("They pay for it," Bertie said.) Was this fun? Viola despaired. It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.

People have the wrong idea about fairy tales, they think they're about being rescued by handsome princes, whereas really they're like Girl Guide handbooks.

Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight.

She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.

We're all Bolsheviks now," Izzie said blithely. "And at my table!" Hugh said and laughed.

One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. "One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs.

Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe.

not so much an agent provocateur as an agent passif, if such a thing could be said to exist. ("Sometimes," Perry said, "saying nothing can be your strongest weapon.")

She had taken an almost instant dislike to him over a dinner at Nopi which, when the bill arrived, he had been more than happy to go Dutch on, thereby failing one of her first requirements of a suitor, which was to behave like a gentleman. She wanted doors opening, meals paid for, flowers. Billets-doux (lovely words, made her think of doves – bill and coo). She wanted to be courted. Gallantry. What a lovely word.

She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn't as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses - the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle.

Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.

It's been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.

But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. 'Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they're living their lives at such an intense pitch that it was a completely different way of living.

A garden, as far as Teddy could see, was nature tamed and constrained by artifice.