Kate Atkinson Quotes

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.

She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Running wasn’t pointless, of course. Sometimes you did it to try to outrun your thoughts, sometimes you did it to chase them and bring them down. Sometimes you did it so that you didn’t think at all.

(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.

The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

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.

You said five little words to someone — How can I help you? — and it was as if you'd mortgaged your soul out to them.

"Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion."

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

The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense.

She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down — something that was chasing her down.

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.

... the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.