Quotes from Kate Atkinson

She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.

Must you always see the dark side of everything?' Julia said. 'Someone has to,' Jackson said. 'Yes, but does it have to be you?' Apparently, yes. It did.

Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.

She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.

Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let's face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.

Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different.

Parenting is like writing, most people just make it up as they go along.

words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

no book could ever be left in the condition you found it in because it was changed every time it was read by someone.

Our own homegrown evil, I'm sorry to say. And instead of rooting them out, the plan is to let them flourish—but within a walled garden from which they cannot escape and spread their evil seed." A girl could die of old age following a metaphor like this, Juliet thought. "Very nicely put, sir," she said.

Pamela produced placid babies. They don't tend to turn feral until they're two, she said.

And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.

The roof of the big top was dark blue, spangled with silver stars, and it reminded him of something but he couldn't think what, and then he realized it was the roof - the vault of heaven - in a side chapel at the Catholic church where his mother dragged them three times a day on Sunday when they were very small, until she ran out of energy and let the devil have them. (One Good Turn)

How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs, she said to Ursula.

He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.

Louise remembered that odd fluttery feeling of having a freewheeling baby inside you, independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic.

If Bertie was a god (a favourite fantasy), she would be manufacturing things there was a shortage of - bees, tigers, dormice - not flip-flops and phone covers and toothpaste.

It was just as well the baby was strapped into his high chair, because every so often he would suddenly fling out his arms and legs and try to launch himself into the air like a suicidal starfish.

She was twenty-eight but already jaded. Twenty-eight seemed a particularly unsatisfactory age. She was no longer young and yet no one ever seemed to take her seriously as an adult. People still told her what to do all the time, it was infuriating. Her only power seemed to be over her own children and even that was limited by endless negotiation.

It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.

This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends — 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland — she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout.

Long lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will but they won't.' -Sylvie

She] went around with a beatific smile on her face that could be very irritating if you yourself weren't feeling beatific.

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. You were either moved by it or you weren't.