Quotes from Kate Atkinson

The kind of stuff you tended not to talk about because it wasn't usually a good idea to reveal so much disrepair to other people.

Once, the eye of God watched people, now it was the camera lens.

Once upon a time Jackson had erased his past, now his past had erased him.

Fat people weren't supposed to eat anything, but they were especially not supposed to eat confectionery

If he turned round suddenly and caught her—like a game of statues—she could say she was going to Harrods.

This Temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors of Broadcasting in the year 1931, Sir John Reith being Director General. It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness.

I think we should make sure that we are singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

Knowing that when light is gone, Love remains for shining,' " Dr. Hunter said. "Isn't that lovely? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her dog." "Flush," Reggie said. "Virginia Woolf wrote a book about him.

He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. Quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.

white lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.

Police weren't like vampires, they didn't wait to be invited in.

maybe I don't want to eat bloody coriander!' She came to an abrupt halt, whiplashing the baby in the pushchair. She turned round and said, 'Well, maybe I do,' and glared at him for the longest time, wishing she had the woodcutting axe with her, the axe that

Pamela wanted to die with her own hips and her own teeth; beyond that she didn't have much of a goal.

It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.

Sylvia was nuts, of course. She'd told Amelia that God (not to mention Joan of Arc) had spoken to her. In the unlikely event of God speaking to anyone, Sylvia did not seem the obvious choice.

Our business is concluded.

And then suddenly she was on her feet, her heart knocking in her chest, a sudden familiar but long-forgotten terror triggered- but by what?

Yes, Mrs. Todd, a bonny, bouncing baby girl." Sylvie thought

The rich had always commissioned portraits of themselves but the poor moved invisibly through history.

The college was run by a man called Mr. Carver whose lifelong passions were Esperanto and Pitman's shorthand, the latter more useful than the former.

Ursula found herself dwelling on Hugh's death, his absence more than his death.

I am bound to the unknown and neglected Stuart-Murrays by spiralling tapeworms of genetic material. We are, dead and alive (but mostly dead, it seems) the glowing molecular dust of stars, a galactic debris of bacteria and germs. Our veins are the colour of delphiniums and lupins, our arterial blood a febrile brew of crushed geranium petals and hot-house roses, thinned with plasma like catarrh and -

Teddy thought of his wife and his sister as two sides of the same shining coin. Nancy was an idealist, Ursula a realist; Nancy an optimist with a lively heart, while Ursula's spirit was freighted with the grief of history. Ursula was forever cast out of Eden and making the best of it while Nancy, cheerful and undaunted, was sure her search for the gate back into the garden would be successful.

This was beauty too. Was there anything in nature that wasn't?