Kate Atkinson Quotes & Sayings

We're all primitives underneath, that's why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and centre. — Kate Atkinson

A similar obligatory likeness of George adorned Mrs Glover's bedside table. Trussed in uniform and uncomfortable before a studio backdrop that reminded Sylvie of the Amalfi coast, George Glover no longer resembled a Sistine Adam. Sylvie thought of all the enlisted men who had already undergone the same ritual, a keepsake for mothers and sweethearts, the only photograph that would ever be taken of some of them. 'He could be killed,' Bridget said of her beau, 'and I might forget what he looked like.' Sylvie had plenty of photographs of Hugh. He led a well-documented life. — 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

Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy's last crew - Clifford the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie - all bail out successfully from F-Fox and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future. — 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

When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape. — Kate Atkinson

The grain had entered the shell (Sylvie's own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company. His — Kate Atkinson

sequiturs. 'That's got nothing to do with it,' Teddy — Kate Atkinson

Love at first sight, she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren't 'true' love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness. — Kate Atkinson

Fine,' she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from 'I'm dying in anguish' to 'I'm experiencing euphoric joy.' 'Fine,' she said. 'I'm fine. — Kate Atkinson

I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am. — Kate Atkinson

In the prosperous household of Sylvie's childhood, Cook was called 'Cook' but Mrs Glover preferred 'Mrs Glover'. It made her irreplaceable. Sylvie still stubbornly referred to her as Cook. — Kate Atkinson

Teddy didn't really understand the attraction of the dark side for the young these days. Perhaps because they had never experienced it. They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their own. — Kate Atkinson

But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. 'Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they're living their lives at such an intense pitch that it was a completely different way of living. — Kate Atkinson

What's life worth if you can't have some fun? — Kate Atkinson

Diamond Jubilee with him for extra contrition. Her father was clearly exhausted, sleeping almost all the time now, like an aged dog. Why didn't he just go? Was he hanging on for a hundred? Two more years of this? It was mere existence - an amoeba had more life. "The triumph of the human spirit," the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about "positive outcomes" and "enhancement programmes" - emollient management-speak, meaningless to most of the residents of Poplar Hill, who were either dying or demented or both. It was called a "care home" but there was precious little of either to be had when you were run by a profit-based health-care provider employing — 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. — Kate Atkinson

A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body. — Kate Atkinson

This was their third bar since Piccadilly and they were both agreed that the two of them were very drunk but had the capacity to get a good deal drunker yet. — Kate Atkinson

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. — Kate Atkinson

He noticed that Ursula's ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. — Kate Atkinson

We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we?" Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, "But remember, without the cog there is no machine. — Kate Atkinson

Winter dark, five o'clock in the morning by the little gold carriage clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. The clock, an English one ('Better than a French one', her mother had instructed), had been one of her parents' wedding presents. When the creditors came to call after the society portraitist's death his widow hid the clock beneath her skirts, bemoaning the passing of the crinoline. Lottie appeared to chime on the quarter, disconcerting the creditors. Luckily they were not in the room when she struck the hour. — Kate Atkinson

She was real and she was dead. And she was out there somewhere. — Kate Atkinson

I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front. — Kate Atkinson

He was born a politician.
No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become. — Kate Atkinson

No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try. — Kate Atkinson

Maths was "the one true thing," according to Nancy.
"Not love?" Teddy said.
"Oh, love, of course," Nancy said, in an offhanded way. "Love is crucial, but it's an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can't be manipulated." An unsatisfactory answer, surely, Teddy thought. It seemed to him that love should be the absolute, trumping everything. Did it? For him? — Kate Atkinson

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it? — Kate Atkinson

There is a world outside these walls. — Kate Atkinson

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. — Kate Atkinson

I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead. — 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

feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She'd just — Kate Atkinson

If it hadn't been for this chance hospital encounter, accidental in all senses, Victor might never have courted a girl. He already felt well on his way to middle age, and his social life was still limited to the chess club. Victor didn't really feel the need for another person in his life, in fact he found the concept of "sharing" a life bizarre. He had mathematics, which filled up his time almost completely, so he wasn't entirely sure what he wanted with a wife. Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness, but also a multiplicity of physical drawbacks - blood, sex, children - which were unsettling and other. — Kate Atkinson

Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time. — Kate Atkinson

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

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

Fox Corner - that's what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn't that be the point?'
'Really?' Hugh said doubtfully. 'It's a little whimsical, isn't it? It sounds like a children's story. The House at Fox Corner.'
'A little whimsy never hurt anyone.'
'Strictly speaking, though,' Hugh said, 'can a house be a corner? Isn't it at one?'
So this is marriage, Sylvie thought. — Kate Atkinson

Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness. — Kate Atkinson

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense. — Kate Atkinson

He had taken a few days' leave from his army training and they had taken refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel while an unexploded bomb in the Strand was being dealt with. They could hear the naval guns that had been stationed on trolleys between Vauxhall and Waterloo
boom-boom-boom
but the bombers were looking for other targets and seemed to have moved on. 'Doesn't it ever stop?' Jimmy asked.
'Apparently not.'
'It's safer in the army,' he laughed. — Kate Atkinson

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. — Kate Atkinson

And then suddenly she was on her feet, her heart knocking in her chest, a sudden familiar but long-forgotten terror triggered- but by what? — Kate Atkinson

dystopia, a reliably clean, well-lighted place. — Kate Atkinson

She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back. Suddenly, — Kate Atkinson

Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention. — Kate Atkinson

Nancy fell in love with Viola at first sight of her. A coup de foudre, she said, more intense and overwhelming than any form of romantic love. Mother and daughter were each a world to the other, complete and unassailable. — Kate Atkinson

I dreamt of going on the stage once," he said, looking crestfallen. "It's never too late," I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late. — Kate Atkinson

I don't think I'd mind working on a cheese counter. It would leave my mind free to do whatever it wanted - which is nothing in particular, it's true, but I like being alone in my head, I'm used to it. — Kate Atkinson

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go. — Kate Atkinson

He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother's arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it. — Kate Atkinson

Continually amazed at just how many skills and crafts could go into making "a lovely home" - the patchwork quilts you could sew, the curtains you could ruffle, the cucumbers you could pickle, the rhubarb you could make into jam, the icing-sugar decorations you could create for your Christmas cake - which you were supposed to make in September at the latest (for heaven's sake) - and at the same time remember to plant your indoor bulbs so they would also be ready for "the festive season," and it just went on and on, every month a list of tasks that would have defeated Hercules and that was without the everyday preparation of meals, — Kate Atkinson

Maybe we're all the living dead, reconstituted from the dust of the dead. — Kate Atkinson

There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky. — Kate Atkinson

She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. — Kate Atkinson

Powerful men needed their women to be unchallenging, the home should not be an arena for intellectual debate. — Kate Atkinson

They were both Filipino and laughed no matter what you said. Were the Philippines really such a happy place or were the carers just happy not to be there? — Kate Atkinson

Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book. — Kate Atkinson

strangers? Millie's swan song on the stage, the last — Kate Atkinson

As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow. — Kate Atkinson

Was there a poet who hadn't written about skylarks? — Kate Atkinson

This is Martin Canning, Neil. He's written a wonderful book." "Fantastic," Neil Winters said, shaking Martin's hand. His hand was damp and soft and made Martin think of something dead you might pick up on the beach. "The first of many, I — Kate Atkinson

It was one of those questions you couldn't ask in case he were to tell the truth. — Kate Atkinson

Disengaging from the rat race Jackson — Kate Atkinson

That one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the — Kate Atkinson

Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, — Kate Atkinson

Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father's brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image. — Kate Atkinson

Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love. — Kate Atkinson

Now it would not be the geography of Empire that would make him, it would be the architecture of war. — Kate Atkinson

She made 'pig' sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice. — Kate Atkinson

It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. 'Oh,' Izzie said, 'You're at an age when a girl is simply consumed by the sublime.' Ursula wasn't 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 Ursula's 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. — Kate Atkinson

What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened - how did you live life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a strength and courage that most people didn't have. — Kate Atkinson

How strange it was that people just kept on going, even when their world no longer existed. — Kate Atkinson

Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded. — Kate Atkinson

Normally she restricts herself to a very narrow spectrum of emotions (irritable, irritated, irritating). — Kate Atkinson

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested. — Kate Atkinson

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say. — Kate Atkinson

A woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head. — 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

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). — Kate Atkinson

She said science had made the world a worse place, that it was all about men inventing new ways to kill people. — Kate Atkinson

It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it. Bridget — Kate Atkinson

Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret. — Kate Atkinson

The sour aura of dissatisfaction that seeped through the walls, along with the even less appetizing smell of boiled cabbage, was really quite depressing. Ursula wanted her refugees to be soulful and romantic - fleeing for their cultural lives - rather than the abused wives of insurance clerks. Which was ridiculously unfair of her. — 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

The coat was forties-style, made from Canadian beaver at a time when people didn't think about whether or not it was wrong to wear fur. Although Gloria would no longer wish to wear the skin of another animal on top of her own, the way she looked at it now, the beavers were already long dead and had lived the happy, uncomplicated life of Canadian beavers before the war. — Kate Atkinson

I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters. — Kate Atkinson

Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel. — Kate Atkinson

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. — Kate Atkinson

I heard someone say once that hindsight was a wonderful thing, that without it there would be no history. — Kate Atkinson

Without siblings you get quite a skewed vision of yourself and of the world. I always felt I didn't understand how it worked. I remember feeling quite lonely. — Kate Atkinson

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. — Kate Atkinson

History is all about 'what ifs — Kate Atkinson

War is Man's greatest fall from grace, of course, especially perhaps when we feel a moral imperative to fight it and find ourselves twisted into ethical knots. We can never doubt (ever) the courage of those men in the Halifaxes and Stirlings and Lancasters but the bombing war was undoubtedly a brutish affair, a crude method employing a blunt weapon, continually hampered by the weather and lack of technology (despite massive advances that war always precipitates). The large gap between what was claimed for the results of the bombing campaign and what was actually achieved was never fully understood at the time, and certainly not, I suspect, by those men flying the bombers. — Kate Atkinson

She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn't as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses - the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle. — Kate Atkinson

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

There was a stiff bell-pull instead of a doorbell that Teddy had to yank hard for any result. They could hear a faint ringing somewhere beyond the fortress-like front door. No footsteps of anyone rushing to open it. It was a house in mourning, Teddy supposed. — Kate Atkinson

Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women? — Kate Atkinson