by ·

Kate Atkinson Quotes | Quotes said by Kate Atkinson

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #1

    -by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I've discovered so far).


  • Kate Atkinson Quote #2

    ... Angus had a pretty normal childhood. Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #3

    ...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 Quote #4

    Je suis désolé,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    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 Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

    And when all else is gone, Art remains.

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

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

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #13

    Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination - they don't conform to the reality that's around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress.

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep - no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

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

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #23

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

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

  • Kate Atkinson Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

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

You May Also Like

Recent Posts

Related Posts

0 comments:

Post a Comment