373 Quotes by Kate Atkinson

Now it would not be the geography of Empire that would make him, it would be the architecture of war.

She remembered holding Pamela’s babies – remembered Teddy and Jimmy, too – how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be if it were her own child? Perhaps too strong to bear. Over.

She was twenty-eight but already jaded. Twenty-eight seemed a particularly unsatisfactory age. She was no longer young and yet no one ever seemed to take her seriously as an adult. People still told her what to do all the time, it was infuriating. Her only power seemed to be over her own children and even that was limited by endless negotiation.

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.

After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink.

Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists. When.

What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened – how did you live life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a strength and courage that most people didn’t have.

Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving.

Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.