Quotes from Kate Atkinson

Well, you know, Ruby, people are given the mother they need for a particular incarnation. But then she shrugs helplessly because neither of us can think why we needed Bunty.

Jackson was surprised she didn't have "Up for It" tattooed on her forehead.

The Amethyst deflated with the dawn. It needed the night to come alive, its open maw demanding to be fed with an endless parade of people.

And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden—a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.

Time did not heal—it merely rubbed at the wound, slowly and relentlessly.

The rest of the Cokers gravitated rapidly towards the casualty. They were naturally drawn to trouble.

Terence Smith. Graham's golem, formed from the slime at the bottom of a pond of lowlifes somewhere in the Midlands.

the dogs had got into the graveyard and were now moving like Hoovers across the ground, their noses down, their tails up, their small dog brains consumed with the idea of uncharted territory and a thousand new scents.

sequiturs. 'That's got nothing to do with it,' Teddy

Gloria watched as Terry lumbered down the path. He reminded her a little of King Kong, but less friendly.

Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well mannered of people, and yet… Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English

Popular versurs literary—a false divide?

He turned to look at the dog and said, "Oh, it's not mine. I thought you could perhaps do me the favor of looking after it for a short while.

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur—if a dish was about to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances.

I always thought the girl in that picture had the look of a frog about her," Nancy said, thinking, I look enigmatic because I'm dying. "Isn't

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

Lying came easily to Niven, he thought of it as a means of protecting the truth.

Gloria had never understood why you would want to wear an instrument of torture and death as an ornament. You may as well wear a noose or a guillotine. At least Tatiana's earrings were plain, no twin dying bodies of Christ writhing on them. Did the crucifixes ever put the clients off ? Jews, Muslims, atheists, vampires— how did they feel?

His head was always in the clouds. 'I'm writing a novel,' he told her. As if that was something to crow about. As if there weren't enough novels in the world already.

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

You couldn't necessarily judge a woman by the man she slept with. (Or could you?) Eva

There was a stiff bell-pull instead of a doorbell that Teddy had to yank hard for any result. They could hear a faint ringing somewhere beyond the fortress-like front door. No footsteps of anyone rushing to open it. It was a house in mourning, Teddy supposed.

He noticed that Ursula's ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.