Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Finding Jackson Brodie at the heart of this melee seemed par for the course, somehow. He was a friend to anarchy.

It had been a while since Juliet had shared her bed with anyone. There had been a few, but she thought of them as mistakes rather than lovers

Back out in what passed for daylight, he was greeted by ancient, tall tenements staring blankly at each other from either side of the street, making it feel more like a tunnel, making it feel as if night had fallen. If there had been no people around, you might have mistaken it for a film set of a Dickens novel. You might have mistaken it for the past itself.

Cricket was one thing, but golf was a quite different enigma as far as Jackson was concerned. He was prepared to bet the future of the universe on the fact that he would never play the game.

This was how people disappeared from history, wasn't it? They weren't erased, they were explained away.

I know," Ursula said, "it's like the Emperor's new clothes.

Every guy you saw these days had shaved away his male-pattern baldness in a futile attempt to look hard rather than merely hairless.

Now that the war looked as if it was going to last forever Ursula had decided she might as well embark on Proust.

names that were so bad that when they dared to whisper them (bitch-cunt-whore-poet) to each other beneath the bedclothes, they were like poison in the air.

do a typing and shorthand

How would he manage if he became blind? At least if he was blind he could get a guide dog - there was an upside to everything, a silver lining of helpful Labs and noble German Shepherds eager to be his eyes. What if he became deaf? They had dogs for the deaf, too, but Martin wasn´t sure what they did. Tugged at your sleeve a lot probably while looking meaningfully at things.

Maybe we're all the living dead, reconstituted from the dust of the dead.

He wondered sometimes if it wasn't so much that Tommy and Andy shared a secret as that they liked to make him think they shared a secret. Men never really left the snigger of the schoolyard, they just grew bigger.

The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself from the grit. From the truth...

It was as if a complicated game of chess was being played, but Juliet didn't know all the rules or where anyone else was on the board. She was clearly intended to be a pawn in this game. But I am a queen, she thought. Able to move in any direction.

Jimmy, the baby produced to celebrate the peace after the war to end all wars, was about to fight in another one.

I'm a shadow of my former self, she announces. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she's a shadow of a shadow.

Everyone she worked alongside in France had been insatiable letter-writers and resolute diary-keepers, but Gwendolen had felt no urge to chronicle, no desire for an aide-mémoire. Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone. Perhaps, after all, one's purpose in this world was to be forgotten, not remembered.

Courage is the watchword Miss Armstrong.

We're dying from the moment we're born

Frank joined up the day that Albert crossed the Channel – Frank knew he was a coward and was terrified other people would find out as well so he thought he'd join up as quickly as possible before anyone noticed.

Louise's possessions looked like a refugee's beside his, a refugee who spent a lot of time in IKEA.

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.

Being kind modified the extraordinary, alarming otherness of him, which was threefold—large, male and American.