Quotes from Kate Atkinson

You have an eye," Miss Gillies told her. I have two, she thought.)

Florence did, however, attend Mass regularly in Corpus Christi, the Catholic church on Maiden Lane, and Freda wondered if she professed her contrition and was absolved (Florence had taught her the word). How handy it must be to have one's slate wiped clean on a regular basis.

Women, he sneered, what are they good for? Laundry and fucking. Ramsay wondered if Gerrit had actually met Nellie. His mother seemed good for neither of those activities, but then Nellie wasn't really a woman, she was an element, like iron.

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was—wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers "came to grips" with this problem a long time ago, Dr.

Everything was from duty, nothing from love. Duty killed you in the end.

Jackson would have chosen himself. It was designed

The room stank of boys. Louise imagined a girl's room would smell of nail varnish, pencils, cheap candy sweets. Archie's room was essence of testosterone and feet.

Chivalry requireth that youth should be trained to perform the most laborious and humble offices with cheerfulness and grace.

See you later, pet. Don't do anything I wouldn't!," which gave Freda a pretty broad canvas to work on.

strangers? Millie's swan song on the stage, the last

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.

She needed more time, there simply wasn't enough of it. This was the only way she could think of making it (setting her alarm five minutes earlier every day). Not making it exactly, if you could make it from scratch - brand new time- that would be fantastic.

Art was dangerous—it gave you ideas.

He liked Vermeer, all those cool interiors spoke of an ordinariness he could relate to, a moment in time captured forever, because life wasn't about legions of Madonnas and water lilies, it was about the commonplace of details—the woman pouring milk from a jug, the boy sitting at the kitchen table, eating a chicken pie.

As we say in this part of the world," he said to the Discovery, "there's nowt so queer as folk.

he wanted a son so he could teach him all the things he knew, as well as how to learn all the things he didn´t know. he couldn´t teach his daughter anything, she knew more than he did already.

In Jackson's experience it was often best to avoid the thing you were afraid of. Discretion really was sometimes the better part of valor.

From here he could see the farmer's daughter in the yard, feeding the geese. Wasn't there a nursery rhyme in there somewhere? No, he was thinking of the farmer's wife, wasn't he?--cutting off tails with a carving knife. A horrid image. Poor mice, he had thought when he was a boy. Still thought the same now that he was a man. Nursery rhymes were brutal affairs.

Ursula's heart tripped and skipped and flipped at the sight of him. The very object of her affection! The reason she had taken the long way round was on the unlikely chance that she might engineer an "accidental" meeting with Benjamin Cole. And here he was! What luck.

The pilot was taking the helm.

She had been the "muse" of a writer for a while. You hardly heard his name anymore. He was quite famous at the time, although possibly more famous for his lifestyle than his works. He was unfaithful and drank from breakfast to bedtime. Boozing and whoring, he said, the Rights of Man. She had been one of his trophies, "muse" a fancy word for mistress. He lived in Chelsea but had a wife and three small children tucked away in the country somewhere.

The hotel gave him a twin-bedded room, which seemed worse, the unoccupied bed like a reproach somehow.

War did indeed make strange bedfellows of people.

The sour aura of dissatisfaction that seeped through the walls, along with the even less appetizing smell of boiled cabbage, was really quite depressing. Ursula wanted her refugees to be soulful and romantic—fleeing for their cultural lives—rather than the abused wives of insurance clerks. Which was ridiculously unfair of her.