Quotes from Kate Atkinson

That was the good thing about Julia, her family background was even more fucked up than his. They were a pair of freakishly bereaved people.

Rosemary was trying her best to retain good government in this family, against all the odds and without any help from a husband, for whom the quotidian demands of meals and housework and child care were meaningless

feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She'd just

Why did you have children?' Bertie asked, later in their lives. 'Was it just the biological imperative to breed?' 'That's why everyone has children,' Viola said. 'They just dress it up as something more sentimental.') Viola

bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something

the gingerbread house was a prison, not a place of safety. It was where you were fattened up for the oven by the witch so you could be eaten, like a Christmas goose.

She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back. Suddenly

But then, what constituted real? Wasn't everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?

Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, "the sign that one has acquired one's learning from novels, rather than an education," according to Sylvie.

He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep - no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. JOHN 8:32

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing. The

You can try things on if you want," Izzie said carelessly. "Although you're rather small compared to me. Jolie et petite." Ursula declined, fearing enchantment. They were the kind of clothes that might turn you into someone else.

He smelled of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, So, I hear you tried to kill your maid? (Oh, that's why I'm here, Ursula thought.)

He had his standards. He had trained at the Ritz before losing his post there due to an unfortunate incident involving two chambermaids and a linen cupboard. You can imagine the rest, he said to Nellie when he applied for the job at the Amethyst. I'd rather not, she said.

God created Man," she repeated. "And then he had a better idea.

normally she restricts herself to a very narrow spectrum of emotions (irritable, irritated, irritating).

What on earth was she doing with her life? Could she just get up and leave?

They had stepped into marriage in a frail barque that had long ago entered the doldrums and floundered in the deep. Miss Kelling, on the other hand, looked like someone who would steer a steady course. He had entangled his mind horribly in seafaring imagery, there seemed no way out of it except to abandon ship.

Sometimes," Perry said, "saying nothing can be your strongest weapon.") Juliet, and perhaps Juliet alone, had begun to sense Godfrey's impatience. She had learned to read between the lines. But wasn't that where the most important things were said?

those fateful words We are now at war with Germany, and for several hours felt strangely numb. She tried to phone Pamela

There was some kind of celebrity reality show on. She didn't know who any of the "celebrities" were and there didn't seem to be anything real about the predicaments they found themselves in.

When Theo returned along St. Andrews Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing

Gwendolen was so touched that she wept, but quietly, for her mother would have been monstrously jealous of such emotion. She had claimed grief for her own long ago.