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104aaa5
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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.
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Kate Atkinson |
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532b45e
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Sister Michael turned and looked at him, and, despite her plump, jolly face, she had nuns' eyes, and nuns' eyes, Jackson knew, could see right inside your head, so he nodded respectfully at the statue. Sanguis Christi, inebria me.
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Kate Atkinson |
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e8830ab
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If Bertie was a god (a favourite fantasy), she would be manufacturing things there was a shortage of - bees, tigers, dormice - not flip-flops and phone covers and toothpaste.
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god
dormice
flipflops
phone-covers
toothpaste
tigers
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Kate Atkinson |
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ae37feb
|
All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders - Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge.
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Kate Atkinson |
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483a0f1
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She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.
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Kate Atkinson |
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64228df
|
So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.
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progress
elements
german
germans
ugly
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Kate Atkinson |
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b1b2bd9
|
As the first clod of earth hit her mother's coffin, Juliet could barely catch a breath. Her mother would suffocate beneath all that earth, she thought, but Juliet was suffocating too. An image came to her mind--the martyrs who were pressed to death by stones piled on top of them. That is me, she thought, I am crushed by loss. "Don't seek out elaborate metaphors," her English teacher had said of her school essays, but her mother's death had ..
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Kate Atkinson |
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111daf4
|
not so much an agent provocateur as an agent passif, if such a thing could be said to exist. ("Sometimes," Perry said, "saying nothing can be your strongest weapon.")"
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Kate Atkinson |
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8b6d936
|
I, of course, am considered mad, bad and dangerous to know.
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Kate Atkinson |
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bad23a4
|
You were very brave,' Nancy said, with the same encouraging indifference
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Kate Atkinson |
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05ef590
|
trying to restore some kind of natural balance of humors in the world.
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Kate Atkinson |
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bce05ce
|
do a typing and shorthand
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Kate Atkinson |
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242397b
|
Yes, Mrs. Todd, a bonny, bouncing baby girl." Sylvie thought"
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Kate Atkinson |
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c0c9407
|
Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire.
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kate atkinson |
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22155f5
|
The room stank of boys. Louise imagined a girl's room would smell of nail varnish, pencils, cheap candy sweets. Archie's room was essence of testosterone and feet.
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Kate Atkinson |
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ab6aaeb
|
A good rule of thumb was that the more noise someone was making the less likely they were to die.
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Kate Atkinson |
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c0ab1e5
|
Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn't really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs.
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Kate Atkinson |
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8f85a58
|
You can't change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present. That's what they said.
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Kate Atkinson |
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4720bba
|
Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let's face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.
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Kate Atkinson |
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5c05ea0
|
Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours
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Kate Atkinson |
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290864e
|
Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.
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Kate Atkinson |
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eaa5e50
|
Ursula found it very odd to think that up above them there were German bombers being flown by men who, essentially, were just like Teddy. They weren't evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men. Although she would make an exception for Hitler.
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Kate Atkinson |
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31ab7cf
|
No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let's face it, no one warned you about anything.
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Kate Atkinson |
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ef7723b
|
You don't see the point of English literature?' 'I don't see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?
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Kate Atkinson |
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ff262ef
|
But when you split someone's head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.
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Kate Atkinson |
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0fbfe85
|
How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)
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Kate Atkinson |
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c5da393
|
It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. You were either moved by it or you weren't.
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Kate Atkinson |
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889741c
|
The purpose of Art,' his mother, Sylvie, said - instructed even - 'is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.
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Kate Atkinson |
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94bc94d
|
It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it. Bridget
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Kate Atkinson |
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07dcae6
|
What's life worth if you can't have some fun?
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Kate Atkinson |
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9d91c31
|
We're all primitives underneath, that's why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and centre.
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Kate Atkinson |
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221e3c8
|
She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back. Suddenly,
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Kate Atkinson |
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71efe12
|
And I can't cry, I don't even want to cry. My tears would never do justice to this loss.
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Kate Atkinson |
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e11c0b5
|
'Sacrifice,' " Sylvie said, "is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.") But,"
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Kate Atkinson |
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9902a8e
|
anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense
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Kate Atkinson |
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57c99ae
|
Shropshire, the fatlands of Gloucestershire,
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Kate Atkinson |
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dcabe32
|
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.
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Kate Atkinson |
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06479c4
|
sequiturs. 'That's got nothing to do with it,' Teddy
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Kate Atkinson |
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a753d6c
|
Ah, but the rich are different,' the footman said, 'they take a lot more looking after.
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Kate Atkinson |
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9f45259
|
Harold?' 'Poor man, I suppose
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Kate Atkinson |
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5b4dc0c
|
those fateful words We are now at war with Germany, and for several hours felt strangely numb. She tried to phone Pamela
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Kate Atkinson |
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27c0ae3
|
Home... wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.
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Kate Atkinson |
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ebb6b00
|
Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.
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Kate Atkinson |
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6bb9d5b
|
it was one of those questions you couldn't ask in case he were to tell the truth.
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Kate Atkinson |