Kate Atkinson Quotes

If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.

...but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.

Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.

"Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard."

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.

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.

If she had been in charge of designing the human race she would have gone about things differently. (A golden shaft of light through the ear for conception perhaps and a well-fitting hatch somewhere modest for escape nine months later.)

Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all — a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

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.

Just because something bad had happened to her doesn't mean it won't happen again.

"In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there." It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point.

"So, what do they pay you for...exactly?"
"Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things."
"What kind of things?"
"You know."
"No, I can't even begin to imagine."
"Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog."
"Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?"

In the endgame a pawn can change into a queen.

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.

It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.