Quotes by Kate Atkinson

was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?

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

This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends — Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henrys 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.

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldnt mind being their mother.

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didnt even have the strength to feel guilty.

Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.

Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didnt notice that they were alone, so they wouldnt die without a living soul noticing.

The only time you were safe was when you were dead.

What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day were all dead.

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, didnt understand how attached one could be to a dog.)

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?

They said love made you strong, but in Louises opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldnt get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.

Life wasnt about becoming, was it? It was about being.

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.

She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the futu

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didnt know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.

“It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. Oh, Izzie said, Youre at an age when a girl is simply consumed by the sublime. Ursula wasnt sure what she meant (No one is ever sure what she means, Sylvie said) but she thought she understood a little. There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of imminence that made Ursulas chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness - she could think of no other way of describing it. Perhaps it was the future, she thought, coming nearer all the time.”