Fine,’ she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from ‘I’m dying in anguish’ to ‘I’m experiencing euphoric joy.’ ‘Fine,’ s… - Kate Atkinson

"Dr. Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelled of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, "So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?" (Oh, that's why I'm here, Ursula thought.)"

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.

"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."