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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 195f437 | She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 5300b72 | She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn't as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses - the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle. | life | Kate Atkinson | |
| 6e09c3c | Diamond Jubilee with him for extra contrition. Her father was clearly exhausted, sleeping almost all the time now, like an aged dog. Why didn't he just go? Was he hanging on for a hundred? Two more years of this? It was mere existence--an amoeba had more life. "The triumph of the human spirit," the new nursing sister said, new enough to talk about "positive outcomes" and "enhancement programmes"--emollient management-speak, meaningless to m.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 4f9d35f | I'm always so glad," Sylvie murmured, "that I don't have to take a turn at being other people." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| bf35bb6 | A woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 5c5ac15 | She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the idea of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again not love, more like the feelings you would have for a favorite dog (and, no, she would never have said such a thing to him. Some people, a lot of people, didn't understand how attached one could be to a dog.) | love | Kate Atkinson | |
| c05d6f5 | How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. "One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs," she said to Ursula." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| d420d43 | Don't you wonder sometimes,' Ursula said. 'If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in--I don't know, say, a Quaker household--surely things would be different. | possibilities | Kate Atkinson | |
| 147ee8f | He had taken a few days' leave from his army training and they had taken refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel while an unexploded bomb in the Strand was being dealt with. They could hear the naval guns that had been stationed on trolleys between Vauxhall and Waterloo--boom-boom-boom--but the bombers were looking for other targets and seemed to have moved on. 'Doesn't it ever stop?' Jimmy asked. 'Apparently not.' 'It's safer in the army,' he la.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| f355fd4 | Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant 'See you later,' she concluded. The final irony. 'We never know when it will be the last time,' she said... | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 2a4b94d | Could you be an old maid if you had worn the scarlet letter? | Kate Atkinson | ||
| c77b2e7 | If Richard had lived, perhaps... but one cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever. What is it Heraclitus says? One Cannot step in the same river twice?' ... 'More or less. I suppose a more accurate way of putting it would be "You can step in the same river but the water will always be new." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| db87afa | The past is what you take with you. | past | Kate Atkinson | |
| 652727a | I am a jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox! | ruby-lennox | Kate Atkinson | |
| df87d2c | A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 197f2fe | Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 1f8e6fc | Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 28b1827 | She had taken an almost instant dislike to him over a dinner at Nopi which, when the bill arrived, he had been more than happy to go Dutch on, thereby failing one of her first requirements of a suitor, which was to behave like a gentleman. She wanted doors opening, meals paid for, flowers. Billets-doux (lovely words, made her think of doves - bill and coo). She wanted to be courted. Gallantry. What a lovely word. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| e9e056f | Ah, I know," Bridget said. "For sure, you have the sixth sense." Mrs. Glover, wrestling with the plum pudding, snorted her disapproval. She was of the opinion that five senses were too many, let alone adding on another." | esp senses | Kate Atkinson | |
| cd94cf4 | How wonderfully, joyously, untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, she didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away. If she had realized that Archie wasn't going to be that sunny innocent child for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| b1341fa | They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox ("Naturally," Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf ("Honiahaka" in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shawcross herself was Great White Eagle ("Oh, for heaven's sake," Sylvie said, "talk about hubris")." -- | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 2c32e78 | She...wanted no one--apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of 'unattainable. | nineteenth-century unattainable | Kate Atkinson | |
| 9f8e3fb | The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree... ...The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) .. | blood family generations heirloom kate-atkinson red-string-of-fate the-red-thread | Kate Atkinson | |
| cf8b992 | words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| c524c29 | Dr. Kellet said, "it's a snake with its tail in its mouth." He nodded approvingly and said to Sylvie, "It's a symbol representing the circularity of the universe. Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 9853e9a | When Lillian left work in the early evening the streets were slick and shiny with rain and the lamps flared yellow giving her the melancholy feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She'd just struggled to push up her umbrella when the farmer from Saskatchewan came out of the shadows and tipped his hat again, very politely, and said could he escort her home? She put her small hand on his broad arm and held the umbrella over both.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 142096e | Maths was "the one true thing," according to Nancy. | love | Kate Atkinson | |
| e7a764a | Viola was a good reader, a bookworm--a phrase she hated. "How can a worm be a nice thing to be?" Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at herself for having reached such a pass. "Without worms we wouldn't be able to grow food and everyone would starve," Nancy said reasonably." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 1ed1252 | Mrs. Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the apartment Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn't place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 5bf4936 | The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| e0ed3d6 | This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends -- 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland -- she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout. | humor queen-mother royal-family satire scotland | Kate Atkinson | |
| 49700f1 | How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him? Ursula wondered. It seemed to her that in the search for arguments against marriage the existence of Maurice presented the very best one of all. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 8874d73 | Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father's brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the im.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 01141b8 | One of the remarkable things about Life After Life is the way that this formal experimentation is combined with a consistently involving plot. It is as if the writing of B. S. Johnson had been crossed with the better novels of Anthony Trollope. An entire world emerges but shows itself again and again in different lights. It's an unusual book in many ways: in part a tribute to England and to the resilience of the English character revealed u.. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 3b38555 | There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 6bb40cd | She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing. | humor husky-voice men sexy women | Kate Atkinson | |
| d4ed8c1 | Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him. | death killing metaphor senseless-death skylark waste | Kate Atkinson | |
| a96e9ec | There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of imminence that made Ursula's chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness--she could think of no other way of describing it. Perhaps it was the future, she thought, coming nearer all the time. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 395c236 | A similar obligatory likeness of George adorned Mrs Glover's bedside table. Trussed in uniform and uncomfortable before a studio backdrop that reminded Sylvie of the Amalfi coast, George Glover no longer resembled a Sistine Adam. Sylvie thought of all the enlisted men who had already undergone the same ritual, a keepsake for mothers and sweethearts, the only photograph that would ever be taken of some of them. 'He could be killed,' Bridget .. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| be0587b | eye for an eye," Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)" -- | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 41c0a7f | she didn't see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 5b1fc98 | Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart. | Kate Atkinson | ||
| e429f9f | Bridget wouldn't let Trixie come to Mrs. Dodds's house, she said she would never hear the end of it. "She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said." | Kate Atkinson | ||
| 1cd09aa | Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. | Kate Atkinson |