Quotes from Kate Atkinson

A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother.

Her mother was still more of a presence than an absence in her life. Juliet supposed that one day in the future it would be the other way round, but she doubted that would be an improvement.

He was becoming a walking, talking history lesson, a one-man folk museum, except that nobody was interested in learning anything from him.

Sometimes, when she found herself mired in the twin duties of marriage and motherhood, she thought how her life had been compromised by love.

Teddy didn't really understand the attraction of the dark side for the young these days. Perhaps because they had never experienced it. They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their own.

Sometimes it takes just one good man

What a good husband you are, Nancy said afterward, always taking your wife's side rather than your mother's. It's the side of reason I am on, Teddy said. It just so happens that that's where you're always to be found and my mother rarely.

Part of him died during the war. This was just the rest of him catching up," and she put her finger to the corner of her eye and dabbed at a trace of moisture there—a tear would have been too generous a description.

The novelty of hospital visiting was being slowly replaced by the fatigue of hospital visiting.

She no longer recognized herself, she thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.

He had a wonderful way of drawing them out with his placid responses (Hm? And Yes, yes and I see), not so much an agent provocateur as an agent passif, if such a thing could be said t exist.

It never ceased to surprise the Cokers how willing nightclub patrons were to pitch in behind the scenes. For the novelty of it, rather than altruism. They loved a disaster.

Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded.

Aren't I happy?' Ursula puzzled. What do you think? Ursula didn't know. She wasn't sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.

Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours

No one was amused now. ('The clowns are the dangerous ones,' Perry said.)

They were both Filipino and laughed no matter what you said. Were the Philippines really such a happy place or were the carers just happy not to be there?

Hegelian synthesis. Dualism

First things were nice, last things not so much so.

i will be the hunter, not the hunted. diana, not the stag. the arrow, not the bow.

He's always been a politician. He was born a politician. No. Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he had chosen to become.

She was wearing a skimpy top that belonged on a teenager but it revealed her neat, hard biceps (she definitely worked out) and at least she had triceps, unlike Amelia, who had the kind of swinging underarm flesh that would have made it easy for her to glide among the treetops.

that one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the

She was flawed, no longer intact. On the other hand, she felt as if she had been scourged clean. The past no longer weighed so heavily on the present.