Quotes from Kate Atkinson

It would be like a Hardy novel, before it all goes wrong.

So, what do they pay you for...exactly? Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things. What kind of things? You know. No, I can't even begin to imagine. Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog. Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?

I wanted her for what she was, but when I got her I wanted her to change.

You said five little words to someone--How can I help you?--and it was as if you'd mortgaged your soul out to them.

shop-bought cakes are a sign of sluttish housewifery.

There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky.

There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening

Time isn't circular," she said to Dr. Kellet. "It's like a… palimpsest.

Perhaps sex was something you had to learn and then stick at until you were good at it, like hockey or the piano. But an initial lesson would be helpful.

Slattern! What a wonderful new word. 'Slattern,' I murmur appreciatively to Patricia. 'Yes, slattern,' Bunty says firmly. 'That's what she is.' 'Not a slut like you then?' Patricia says very quietly. Loud enough to be heard, but too quiet to be believed.

Juliet and Hartley had long ago abandoned manners with each other. It was refreshing to behave without respect towards someone.

When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape.

Best always to praise rather than criticize.

Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.

Now we must feast!' Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion – it seemed like cannibalism, not to mention utterly disgusting.

Truth is truth to the end of reckoning . What was that from? Measure for Measure ? But perhaps, truth was asleep until the end of reckoning. There was going to be an awful lot of reckoning when the time came.

That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers.

She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the idea of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again not love, more like the feelings you would have for a favorite dog (and, no, she would never have said such a thing to him. Some people, a lot of people, didn't understand how attached one could be to a dog.)

Do you keep time in the same place that you save it? If so why is it always so difficult to find? It must be in a very safe place.

Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy's last crew—Clifford the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie—all bail out successfully from F-Fox and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future.

I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,' Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was.

It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did.

She supposed she was a little cog in the big wheel of Empire. "Nothing wrong with being a cog," Maurice said, himself now a big wheel in the Home Office. "The world needs cogs.

Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.