Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Louise would have removed his organs without anesthetic and given them to more worthy people.

let's face it, no one warned you about anything.

Was I really such a terrible mother?' she asked Bertie. 'Why the past tense?' Bertie said. Sow and reap.

She was dressed in a rainbow-striped jumper that looked as if it had been crocheted for a gorilla by a gorilla.

he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn't more or less relinquished poetry by then.

Viola had resented other people's pleasure, as if it subtracted something from the world rather than adding to it.

he said that when the baby was born, if it was a boy, I was to call it Edward." "Edward?" Teddy repeated blankly. "After you." And for the first time in the whole of the war Teddy broke.

Oh, man, 'the nursery,' " Dominic said, "what a hell-hole. If I had kids I'd give them the nicest room in the house." "You do have kids," his kid said. "Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.

Much good may honour do them when they're dead

It wasn't that Theo believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.

The reason she had taken the long way round was on the unlikely chance that she might engineer an accidental meeting with Benjamin Cole.

her. It was a cruel thing, trying to sprout and find the light of day. It was truth. She wasn't sure that she wanted it.

a student Christian fellowship whose members roamed the corriders... looking for likely converts (the afraid, the alone, the abandoned) and those who needed to use the bible to fill in the spaces where their personalitites should have been.

She said to him once that when women learned that wall anchors weren't the mysterious objects they thought they were, they would rule the world.

Jessica was easier, her character already fixed at the age of eight. Loyal, resourceful, confident, annoying. Clever, too clever sometimes. Too clever for her own good , their father said but their mother said, That's impossible. Especially for a girl.

What is the fabric of time like? Black silk? A smooth twill, a rough tweed? Or lacy and fragile like something Mrs. Baxter would knit?

the nonconception of beloved children always a stumbling block to the if-I-could-live-my-life-over-again fantasy).

Terri would have made the perfect wife for Bob – they could have simply slept their way through married life. Rip van Winkle and Duchess Anaesthesia, the lost, sleepy daughter of the Romanovs.

Each reported on a myriad others, filaments in an evangelistic web of treachery that stretched across the country.

How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot.

But appearance and reality were different things, weren't they?

Murder and suicide aren't genetic ,' Julia said, scoffing sandwiches in the Black Swan in Helmsley after their visit to Rievaulx Terraces. 'Nathan isn't predisposed to tragedy.' Jackson wasn't so sure about that but he kept that thought to himself.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness... At work, they regarded her as a person apart... They imagined there must be more to her. A dark horse. And still waters run deep. They would be disappointed to know that even clichés were more interesting than the life she lived.

Sylvie considered that children should be toughened up early, the better to take the blows in later life.