Quotes from Kate Atkinson

The members of the circle...[were] performing a peculiar caper based on Mrs. Shawcross's fancy of what a Saxon dance might have seemed like. (Did Saxons dance? Pamela asked. You never think of them dancing.)

He likes women, children, dogs, really what can you fault?' Pamela wrote. 'It's just a shame he's a dictator with no respect for the law or common humanity.

Moira and the girls and they soon resumed their furtive

What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things—death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

A quick getaway,' she said, shucking

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" EDWARD BERESFORD TODD

Theo wondered if those people who were destined to die young had some kind of premonition of the shortness of the hours and that gave their life an intensity, a seriousness like a shadow.

suspected everyone did—from Winnie, the least pulchritudinous

Working for the environment didn't mean Ewan was a particularly nice person. He was very self-righteous about the fact that he didn't want any part of Graham's business empire, which apparently was playing its own small part in the "global capitalist conspiracy." That didn't stop him from taking money from Graham whenever he was home.

genuine sentiment rather than just nostalgia, always a bit of a cheap emotion

There was something to be said for dying before you ended up in incontinence pads, watching an endless loop of reruns of Friends.

Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone.

It's a symbol representing the circularity of the universe. Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.

The toll of the dead had been her business during the war, the endless stream of figures that represented the blitzed and the bombed passed across her desk to be collated and recorded. They had seemed overwhelming, but the greater figures—the six million dead, the fifty million dead, the numberless infinities of souls—were in a realm beyond comprehension.

a group of mostly middle-aged people (Scots, by their pallor) doing tai chi—Jackson didn't get tai chi, it looked okay on television when you saw people doing it in China, but in Scotland it looked, let's face it, arsy.

Buying and selling, that's all people did. You could buy women, you could buy kids, you could buy anything. Western civilization had had a good run but now it had pretty much shopped itself out of existence.

Their parts were fixed—Graham was the villain, Ewan took the role of worthy leading man, Nick was his long-suffering sidekick, and Emily was forever the adolescent ingenue, the moody daughter whose life had been blighted by everyone else (apparently). Gloria herself was offstage, playing the woman in the kitchen.

Shropshire, the fatlands of Gloucestershire

Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree.

Had anyone ever entertained the possibility that Sylvia was schizophrenic? If God spoke to Amelia she would presume she had gone insane.

The purpose of Art,' his mother, Sylvie, said – instructed even – 'is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.

Amelia thought the word "boyfriend" sounded ridiculous when it was applied to a forty-five-year-old woman. When it was applied to herself.

disengaging from the rat race Jackson

Life's too short," she said. There were days when Jackson thought life was too long.