Kate Atkinson Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

What is the fabric of time like? Black silk? A smooth twill, a rough tweed? Or lacy and fragile like something Mrs. Baxter would knit?

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?

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

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?

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.

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.

History is all about 'what ifs

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.