Quotes from Kate Atkinson

What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?

Their names written on water. Or scorched into the earth. Or atomized into the air. Legion.

if there was one thing she found more tedious than thinking about politics it was talking about politics.

Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. ("The clowns are the dangerous ones," Perry said.)

There was no point in preserving the earth, Ms. MacDonald explained in a kindly tone, because the Last Judgment couldn't occur until every last thing on the planet had been destroyed, every tree, every flower, every river. Every last eagle and owl and panda, the sheep in the fields, the leaves on the trees, the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer. Everything. And Ms. MacDonald was looking forward to that.

It was extraordinary how far you could go in London and barely touch a pavement or cross a road.

It was a woman's job to try and improve a man. It was a man's job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.

The only way to stop the tears was to keep drinking the whisky.

I know where we will hide man's divinity, we will hide it inside him. He will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within.

Ursula had grown rather callous about George Glover's lungs, she had heard so much of them that they seemed to have a life of their own, rather like Sylvie's mother's lungs, organs that seemed to have more character than their owner.

And those are the people we don't like," Julia said. "The enemy of the socialist future. Which is just around the corner, isn't it, sweetie? And always will be, forever and forever, amen. God forbid we should ever achieve some kind of prelapsarian utopia on earth because then you would have to live your life instead of just complaining about it.

and Jackson didn't know then what he knew now - what it was like to love a child, how you would give your own life in a heartbeat to save theirs, how they were more precious than the most precious thing.

Jackson thought they should make more television drama about car crime committed by fourteen-year-old boys high on glue and cider and boredom—it would be a lot more realistic, just not very interesting.

That was the trouble, of course. You started off liking someone because of who she was and you ended up wanting her to be different

Love of fate?' 'It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.

There is a world outside these walls.

It was amazing how tedious reading about sex could be at this time of the day, any time of the day, in fact.

Was there a poet who hadn't written about skylarks?

That was the thing about hospitals, anyone could wander into your room and gawp at you when you were at your very lowest, your most unflattering.

People who live on their own do tend to witter. We live without restraint, verbal at any rate.' Nigel

Gwendolen wondered how long her money would last if she moved into a hotel and lived a sybaritic life. Not long, probably. Wasn't this how the devil caught you? You travelled in a cream Hispano-Suiza and shrank from the idea of returning to the omnibus.

It's never too late,' I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.

I heard someone say once that hindsight was a wonderful thing, that without it there would be no history.

she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife, and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost.