Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Live your life, Patrick said, dont endure it

Life's random," he said. "The best you can do is pick up the pieces.

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.

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

I'm always so glad, Sylvie murmured, that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.

She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl was a little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl wasn't it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.

I don't think I'd mind working on a cheese counter. It would leave my mind free to do whatever it wanted - which is nothing in particular, it's true, but I like being alone in my head, I'm used to it.

Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. A monkish thought that he dismissed.

she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return.

What a fantastic form of avoidance being a bride of Christ was.

Teddy tried, in the manner of a simple layman, to keep up with theoretical physics, via articles in the Telegraph and an heroic struggle with Stephen Hawking in 1996, but admitted defeat when he came across string theory. From then on he took every day as it came, hour by hour.

We cannot turn away," Miss Woolf told her, "we must get on with our job and we must bear witness." What did that mean? Ursula wondered. "It means," Miss Woolf said, "that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.

A lot of people thought Theo spoiled his girls, but how could you spoil a child—by neglect, yes, but not by love. You had to give them all the love you could, even though giving that much love could cause you pain and anguish and horror and, in the end, love could destroy you. Because they left, they went to university and husbands, they went to Canada and they went to the grave.

Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element.

It seemed an odd coincidence, but then that was the nature of coincidence, Juliet supposed--it always seemed odd.

It's the side of reason that I'm on," Teddy said. "It just so happens that that's where you're always to be found and my mother rarely.

It was war itself that was evil, not men.

Frobisher should perhaps have realized that Lottie was a woman who was resistant to salvage. She had risen and fallen like the tide, but she seemed to favour the ebb rather than the flow.

William Morris that you should have nothing in your house that you didn't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

He preferred solitary pursuits, and being a member of a group seemed rather dutiful, but he could do dutiful and somebody had to or the world would fall apart.

eye for an eye," Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)

She was rescued from Poland by a priest during the war. At times of national crisis, she can be seen to cry." Jackson thought it might have been better if the priest had rescued a few Jews instead of a plaster statue.

When everything else has gone, love still remains," Dr. Hunter said. "Totally," Reggie said. But what good did it do you? None at all.

trying to restore some kind of natural balance of humors in the world.