Kate Atkinson Quotes

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 didn't 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.
Kate Atkinson
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
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.
Kate Atkinson
They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
Kate Atkinson
How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?
Kate Atkinson
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, didn't understand how attached one could be to a dog.)
Kate Atkinson
The only time you were safe was when you were dead.
Kate Atkinson
What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we're all dead.
Kate Atkinson
Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing.
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
Kate Atkinson
If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.
Kate Atkinson
was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?
Kate Atkinson
So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.
Kate Atkinson
Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.
Kate Atkinson
If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.
Kate Atkinson
...and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something inreturn. Except for one's husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.
Kate Atkinson
You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.
Kate Atkinson
Oh, man, ‘the nursery,’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids,” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.
Kate Atkinson
He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.
Kate Atkinson
The past is what you take with you.
Kate Atkinson
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness
Kate Atkinson
Numinous," Ursula said, breaking the silence eventually. "There's a spark of the divine in the world -- not God, er'er done with God, but something. Is it love? Not silly romantic love, but something more profound...""I think it's perhaps something we don't have a name for," Teddy said. "We want to name everything. Perhaps that's where we've gone wrong.""'And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' Having dominion over everything has been a terrible curse."Afterwards -- because it turned out there was an afterwards for Teddy -- he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.
Kate Atkinson
Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.
Kate Atkinson
All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.
Kate Atkinson
The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
Kate Atkinson
He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good, quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.
Kate Atkinson
What would I put in my bottom drawer? – I would put only sharp objects, the clean lines of broken glass, the honed steel of paring knives, the tiny saw-teeth of bread knives and the soothing edges of razor blades, I weigh knives in my hands like strange comforters.
Kate Atkinson
In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
Kate Atkinson
She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
Kate Atkinson
Popular versus literary—a false divide?
Kate Atkinson
Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.
Kate Atkinson
But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country - The Rest Of My Life.
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
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!
Kate Atkinson
Pamela produced placid babies. "They don't tend to turn feral until they're two," she said.
Kate Atkinson
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?
Kate Atkinson
The mind is a fathomless mystery.
Kate Atkinson
The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's 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.
Kate Atkinson
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 —
Kate Atkinson
They were lucky. They'd been given history.
Kate Atkinson
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 past's what you take with you.
Kate Atkinson
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 past's what you take with you.
Kate Atkinson
It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
Kate Atkinson
Get down,' Bunty says grimly. 'Mummy's thinking.' (Although what Mummy's actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out and she could start again.)
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
Pam wasn't 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.
Kate Atkinson
I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn't want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? 'An educated woman,'Millie amended. 'An educated woman,' Ursula agreed.
Kate Atkinson
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.
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.
Kate Atkinson