Quotes from Kate Atkinson

The plot thickens," he said, and wished he hadn't said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. "I think we have a suspect." That didn't sound much better. "My house has just exploded, by the way." At least that was novel.

Courtney was astonishingly reckless. A kid without reck was a dangerous thing. Other children in the play park yelled and screamed and laughed but Courtney was merely determined to test everything, including herself, to the limits, like a dogged little crash-test dummy.

This was their third bar since Piccadilly and they were both agreed that the two of them were very drunk but had the capacity to get a good deal drunker yet.

But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country - The Rest Of My Life.

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?

First things were good, last things not so much so.

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him? Ursula wondered. It seemed to her that in the search for arguments against marriage the existence of Maurice presented the very best one of all.

Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place.

History is all about 'what ifs

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie . On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names - Eleanor, Lucy, Anna, Charlotte .Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing.

You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty's, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean.

In Teddy's experience people who claimed to be one thing were generally the opposite

They're definitely going to declare war tomorrow. In the morning. It's probably timed so that the nation can get down on its collective knees in church and pray for deliverance.' 'Oh, yes, war is always so Christian, isn't it?

She...wanted no one—apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of 'unattainable.

The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself." SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD

A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a s fragile as a bird's heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood.

it was one of those questions you couldn't ask in case he were to tell the truth.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.

Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention.

Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

Everything changes and nothing remains still. PLATO, Cratylus

He was officially a lunatic, she decided. Strangely, that didn't make him less attractive.