Quotes from Kate Atkinson

In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there. It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point.

Julia's vocabulary was chock-full of strangely archaic words - spiffing, crumbs, jeepers - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination. And this one is Teddy's.

She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.

How quickly life could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

A 'career woman,' Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. A spinster, she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. Perhaps you will never marry, Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula's life was as good as over. Would that be such a bad thing? 'The unmarried daughter,' Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. It was good enough for Jane Austen.

I'm always so glad,' Sylvie murmured, 'that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.' 'You're very good at being yourself,' Ursula said, aware that it didn't necessarily sound like a compliment. 'Well, I've had years of practice.

She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.

Just because something bad had happened to her doesn't mean it won't happen again.

He was one of those people who stared at you with a meaningful smile on their face, as if he was somehow intellectually and spiritually superior, when the fact was he was simply socially inept.

but her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

Time is construct, in relativity every thing flows, no past or present, only the now.

I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.

He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother's arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.

There was always a second before the siren started when she was aware of a sound as yet unheard. It was like an echo, or rather the opposite of an echo. An echo came afterwards, but was there a word for what came before?

The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

Marriage is based on a more enduring kind of love.

Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb...and said to his mother, Can you tidy it up a bit back there?

She was born with the winter already in her bones.