373 Quotes by Kate Atkinson

It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.

And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.

She was one of those girls who wasn’t entirely convinced that food was necessary for survival – anything more robust than a strawberry yoghurt made her anxious.

Our own homegrown evil, I’m sorry to say. And instead of rooting them out, the plan is to let them flourish – but within a walled garden from which they cannot escape and spread their evil seed.” A girl could die of old age following a metaphor like this, Juliet thought. “Very nicely put, sir,” she said.

Why did people understand how precious each day was only once the doors to the grave had opened and they had looked inside? What was the point of that?

Her mother was still more of a presence than an absence in her life. Juliet supposed that one day in the future it would be the other way round, but she doubted that would be an improvement.

Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.

He has been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.

She didn’t feel she had the fortitude for all those Tudors, they were so relentlessly busy – all that bedding and beheading.