373 Quotes by Kate Atkinson

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.

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.

Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

Afterwards – because it turned out that there was to be 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.

Life wasn’t about becoming, was it? It was about being.

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.

The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.

Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.

Love of fate?” “It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.