Quotes from Kate Atkinson

she could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk.

Life is too precious to be unhappy.' Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim. Suddenly

Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing for her beliefs.

If he hadn't been the father of her children, Viola might have admired Dominic for the way he was so easily able to absolve himself of all obligation simply by asserting his right to self-fulfilment.

She was one of those girls who wasn't entirely convinced that food was necessary for survival - anything more robust than a strawberry yoghurt made her anxious.

She... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman...

could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of pinks

The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.

And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.

Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving.

I'm not myself, she said and then laughed maniacally, but God knows who I am.

If Richard had lived, perhaps... but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One Cannot step in the same river twice?' ... 'More or less. I suppose a more accurate way of putting it would be You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

He caught the look on her face, a mixture of distaste and confusion which eventually resolved into something more cryptic. Women usually needed to be acquainted with him a little longer before he saw that expression on their faces.

I am a jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox!

The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself - if anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn't necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (Come along now, don't make such a fuss).

No point in thinking," she said briskly, "you just have to get on with life." (She really was turning into Miss Woolf.) "We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try." (The transformation was complete.) "What if we had a chance to do it again and again," Teddy said, "until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?" "I think it would be exhausting.

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?

He wanted to be deafened by the thunder of her engines, he needed to be drained of every thought by the cold, the noise, the equal amounts of boredom and adrenalin. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now he realized, he had been erased by it.

Being flippant was harder work than being earnest

Before the beginning is the void and the void belongs in neither time nor space and is therefore beyond our imagination. Nothing will come of nothing unless it's the beginning of the world. This is how it begins, with the word and the word is life. The void is transformed by a gigantic firecracker allowing time to dawn and imagination to begin.

She'd had a glimpse of a possible future-the pretty cottage, the garden full of flowers and vegetables, bread in the oven, a bowl of strawberries on the table, the happy baby hitched on her hip while she threw corn to the chickens. It would be like a Hardy novel before it all goes wrong.

Life is too precious to be unhappy.

Ah, I know, Bridget said. For sure, you have the sixth sense. Mrs. Glover, wrestling with the plum pudding, snorted her disapproval. She was of the opinion that five senses were too many, let alone adding on another.

How wonderfully, joyously, untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, she didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away. If she had realized that Archie wasn't going to be that sunny innocent child for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure.