Kate Atkinson Quotes

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.

I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.

"It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. "Who said life was fair?" his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. ("It's not fair, Daddy.") Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise."

The blame generally has to fall somewhere, Miss Armstrong. Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately.

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

Courtney was astonishingly reckless. A kid without reck was a dangerous thing. Other children in the play park yelled and screamed and laughed but Courtney was merely determined to test everything, including herself, to the limits, like a dogged little crash-test dummy.

Home’, it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn’t Egerton Gardens, wasn’t even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.

He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.

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.

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.

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

It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.