Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Didn't you hear, Jackson?" Julia said. "The class war's over. Everyone lost.")

Amelia imagined her parents clasping each other's bodies in a cold embrace and felt sorry for their poor mother who probably thought she had escaped Victor for ever

She prayed now, with desperate conviction but no faith, and she suspected it made no difference either way. When

You might have thought that people would want their kids to stop eating Bassani's ice cream after what had happened.

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was.

Neither of them wanted to be close to their father in life, so why would they want to be close to him in death?

And the bikes, why did people think bikes were a good thing? Why were cyclists so smug? Why did cyclists ride on pavements when there were perfectly good cycle lanes? And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If

fellow alumni, a fact which Murdo said "just goes to show." Gloria thought that it didn't go to show anything except, possibly, that they were greedier and more ruthless than their former classmates.

How do you know he's dead?' 'Because he's not breathing

hooligan posse of gulls wheeled noisily overhead

O passado é aquilo que transportamos connosco

You did not need a God (Sylvie was an unconfessed atheist) to believe in sin.

and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something in return. Except for one's husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.

Art is anything created by one person and enjoyed by another.

the bones of the church, its carcass and ribs, like medieval poetry—apse, chancel, nave, transept, clerestory, sacristy, misericord—

Freda had overheard Cissy telling Gladys that Freda was "a show-off brat." She had been wounded by her sister's judgement on her character. I am not a brat, merely unusually confident, she thought

Sacrifice,' " Sylvie said, "is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.") But

Freda knew that she could tell Cissy about Mr. Birdwhistle's lewd approaches, but she was used to being blamed for the bad behaviour of others and suspected it would be no different in the case of the octopus's wandering tentacles.

Of course, I don't believe in God,' Dr Kellet said. 'But I believe in heaven. One has to

The river this morning was brown and sluggish with a never-ending flotilla of barges and boats, the commerce of the city. No lilacs here. No scent of a hay meadow or of a stand of lime trees, only the stink of a noxious city. Frobisher felt his soul shrivel.

saucers of tinned food on every surface, the cheap stuff that was made from the parts of animals that even the burger chains shunned.

the hospital. He was the youthful partner of an older doctor

The war was a clumsily stitched

Teddy found himself thinking what a decent human being his father had been, the best of all the family really. The grief caught him unawares.