Quotes from Kate Atkinson

In the endgame a pawn can change into a queen.

it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was.

Because life is an adventure, of course." "I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course.

Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labor of the cow

He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.

Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.

By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.

Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.

What would I put in my bottom drawer? – I would put only sharp objects, the clean lines of broken glass, the honed steel of paring knives, the tiny saw-teeth of bread knives and the soothing edges of razor blades, I weigh knives in my hands like strange comforters.

T]he parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with cherries on top. And chocolate shavings and those little silver balls that cracked your fillings.

the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge.

Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.

The only time you were safe was when you were dead.

That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt .

Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.

What a good husband you are,' Nancy said afterward, 'always taking your wife's side rather than your mother's.' 'It's the side of reason I am on,' Teddy said. 'It just so happens that that's where you're always to be found and my mother rarely.

Home', it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn't fall down. They stood up.

the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.

We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we? Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, But remember, without the cog there is no machine.

That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility) - one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one's foreknowledge of events.

I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather's nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.

Personally, I don't think it right to make up things about real people—although I suppose there's an argument for saying that once you're dead you're not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first-class honours, or both).