Kate Atkinson Quotes

Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing.

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.

Numinous," Ursula said, breaking the silence eventually. "There's a spark of the divine in the world -- not God, er'er done with God, but something. Is it love? Not silly romantic love, but something more profound...""I think it's perhaps something we don't have a name for," Teddy said. "We want to name everything. Perhaps that's where we've gone wrong.""'And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' Having dominion over everything has been a terrible curse."Afterwards -- because it turned out there was an afterwards for Teddy -- he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.

He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good, quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?

The mind is a fathomless mystery.