Quotes by Kate Atkinson

She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. 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.

Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. Gone, she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. Just like that. All that exercise for nothing. Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion.

I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesnt want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? An educated woman,Millie amended. An educated woman, Ursula agreed.

Pam wasnt what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.

he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.

Get down, Bunty says grimly. Mummys thinking. (Although what Mummys actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out and she could start again.)

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.

Its funny, isnt it, Miss Woolf whispered in Ursulas ear, how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby, she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. Nonsense, Patricia, I tell her as I climb on board my train. The pasts what you take with you.

They were lucky. Theyd been given history.

Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute governesses. Or — preferably — the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —

The clock had been Sylvies, and her mothers before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvies death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree......The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. (Lovely word, Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasnt everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?

Pamela produced placid babies. They dont tend to turn feral until theyre two, she said.

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

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.

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

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.