373 Quotes by Kate Atkinson

Don’t seek out elaborate metaphors,” her English teacher had said of her school essays, but her mother’s death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.

He wanted to be deafened by the thunder of her engines, he needed to be drained of every thought by the cold, the noise, the equal amounts of boredom and adrenalin. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now he realized, he had been erased by it.

Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving. “ ‘Sacrifice,’ ” he remembered.

Parenting is like writing, most people just make it up as they go along.

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.

Love was the hardest thing. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.

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.

One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

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.