Kate Atkinson Quotes

I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.

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.

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

Needs must, and so on.

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.

I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer. I would put my sisters.

Dear God. When did language and meaning divorce each other and decide to go their separate ways?

you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.

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.

Do not equate nationalism with patriotism... Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.

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

The mountain panorama was the backdrop to every photo taken here, the backdrop to everything. At first Ursula had thought it beautiful, now she was beginning to find its magnificence oppressive. The great icy crags and the rushing waterfalls, the endless pine trees — nature and myth fused to form the Germanic sublimated soul. German Romanticism, it seemed to Ursula, was write large and mystical, the English Lakes seemed tame by comparison. And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden — a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.

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.

Scars heal,” Sylvie said. “Even the worst ones.

It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.