Quotes from Kate Atkinson

The wounds of war, Juliet thought, rather pleased with the way the words sounded in her head. It could be the title of a novel. Perhaps she should write one. But wasn't artistic endeavor the final refuge of the uncommitted?

Angus had a pretty normal childhood. Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

Don't let your imagination run away with you..." But why would you not when the reality was so awful?

Melanie was Irish, and this made everything she said sound nice even when it wasn't.

What was an actuary? Juliet wondered. It sounded as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary.)

You can't have it both ways," one of her girlfriends said. "Tough and tender, men are like steaks, it's one or the other." Tough and tender, a contradiction in terms, Hegelian synthesis.

A good rule of thumb was that the more noise someone was making the less likely they were to die.

What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

If you were to ask me what the book is about (which is the most loathsome question you could ask—why bother to write the thing if you then have to explain it? It is what it is) and if I were forced to answer, I would say, "It's about things.

I, of course, am considered mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Home... wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

Ursula declined, fearing enchantment.

Don't think of it as military," Julia said. "Think of it as theatrical. Massed pipes and drums," she said, reading from a program the so-called piper had given her, "and an army motorcycle stunt team. Highland dancers? And, oh, look, Russian Cossack dancers. That sounds like fun, doesn't it?" "No.

one grief after another—her brothers, Father, the money, not to mention the war itself—had taken its toll on her and she had allowed herself to be worn down on the grindstone of Mother.

It was undignified to be on show like this. 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.

A whole life could be contained in a dinner-service pattern

he had a name, too - a good patriotic name. cry god for harry, england, and saint george.

Men fell down. Women stood up.

Life was all just coming and going, wasn't it? And then eventually it was just going.

You were very brave,' Nancy said, with the same encouraging indifference

Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing

I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.

Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination - they don't conform to the reality that's around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress.

It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.