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ce333e9
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As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn't really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.
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Kate Atkinson |
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03dc39d
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Sweet sixteen," Hugh said, kissing her affectionately. "Happy birthday, little bear. Your future's all ahead of you." Ursula still harbored the feeling that some of her future was also behind her but she had learned not to voice such things."
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Kate Atkinson |
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8f80842
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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.)"
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Kate Atkinson |
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09c14b0
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Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.
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Kate Atkinson |
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70959d0
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Love at first sight, she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren't 'true' love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness.
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Kate Atkinson |
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2a7531d
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This Jackson bloke was the ruddy Scarlet Pimpernel, here, there and everywhere, always one step ahead of Barry. And everywhere he went, women were disappearing.
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Kate Atkinson |
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5612510
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Needs must, and so on.
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Kate Atkinson |
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123bd66
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you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.
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Kate Atkinson |
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74449b1
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The "eat" part was easy. The praying and loving were harder."
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Kate Atkinson |
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c7be579
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I think I would rather just live my life," Teddy said, "not make an artifice of it." --
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Kate Atkinson |
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ff0e927
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The mind is a fathomless mystery.
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Kate Atkinson |
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a0191b7
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What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?" Sylvie said."
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Kate Atkinson |
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c6b3196
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Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labor of the cow
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Kate Atkinson |
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086da50
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As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.
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Kate Atkinson |
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4dfc273
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Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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technology
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Kate Atkinson |
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17e799f
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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.
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marriage
feminism
spinster
single
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Kate Atkinson |
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6fd9d3a
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It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. "Who said life was fair?" his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. ("It's not fair, Daddy.") Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise."
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Kate Atkinson |
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8f74084
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Olivia was her only beautiful child. Julia, with her dark curls and snub nose, was pretty but her character wasn't, Sylvia --- poor Sylvia, what could you say? And Amelia was somehow ...bland, but Olivia, Olivia was spun from light. It seemed impossible that she was Victor's child, although, unfortunately, there was no doubting the fact. Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. Everything was..
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Kate Atkinson |
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7c67009
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It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. 'Oh,' Izzie said, 'You're at an age when a girl is simply by the sublime.' Ursula wasn't sure what she meant ('No one is ever sure what she means,' Sylvie said) but she thought she understood a little. There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of that made Ursula's chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness - she could thi..
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time
future
teenage-years
teenage-girl
summer
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Kate Atkinson |
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9a7413b
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All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing.
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Kate Atkinson |
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424ae67
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A simple acceptance of what comes to us, regarding it as neither bad nor good. as he would have it," Dr Kellet continued ... "It means become who you are," he said."
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Kate Atkinson |
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df5f948
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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. A..
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Kate Atkinson |
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24fecdb
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An eye for an eye," Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)"
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Kate Atkinson |
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79b8ef4
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Writing felt like something she knew, although she only knew it from the other side - reading - and it took her a while to realize that writing and reading were completely different activities - polar opposites, in fact. And just because she could do joined-up handwriting, she discovered, didn't mean that she could write books. But she persevered, perhaps for the first time in her life.
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Kate Atkinson |
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43c42e8
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What if this present were the world's last night' she said. 'The word present makes all the difference, don't you think? It makes it seem as if one's somehow in the thick of it, which we are, rather than simply contemplating a theoretical concept.
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Kate Atkinson |
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37e132b
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He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.
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Kate Atkinson |
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8727d5e
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By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.
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Kate Atkinson |
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3db9e32
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Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.
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Kate Atkinson |
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7476ddf
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The only time you were safe was when you were dead.
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morbid
safe
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Kate Atkinson |
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720ddf0
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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.
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Kate Atkinson |
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0ad18ae
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The blame generally has to fall somewhere, Miss Armstrong. Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately.
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Kate Atkinson |
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1eea72a
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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,' she said. 'I'm fine.
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Kate Atkinson |
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7e59dbe
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The aircraft found the ground before Teddy did and he watched as it exploded in a glittery starburst of light. He would live, he realized. There would be an afterward after all. He gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him.
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Kate Atkinson |
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1292a26
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What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more"... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more d..
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Kate Atkinson |
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38b6315
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From the open French windows Sylvie watched Maurice erecting a makeshift tennis net, which mostly seemed to involve whacking everything in sight with a mallet. Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.
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Kate Atkinson |
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19d9de3
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There were other war veterans in the neighborhood, visible thanks to their limps or missing limbs. 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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79d987b
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Because life is an adventure, of course." "I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course."
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Kate Atkinson |
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1cb391c
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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. .' '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.
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Kate Atkinson |
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25509d1
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Winter dark, five o'clock in the morning by the little gold carriage clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. The clock, an English one ('Better than a French one', her mother had instructed), had been one of her parents' wedding presents. When the creditors came to call after the society portraitist's death his widow hid the clock beneath her skirts, bemoaning the passing of the crinoline. Lottie appeared to chime on the quarter, disconcerting th..
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Kate Atkinson |
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77bda80
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I wanted her for what she was, but when I got her I wanted her to change.
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Kate Atkinson |
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56a05b0
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Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion."
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worship
religion
princess-diana
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Kate Atkinson |
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f60b71c
|
I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead.
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Kate Atkinson |
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5f59630
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Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.
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god
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Kate Atkinson |
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7295071
|
Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.
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Kate Atkinson |