373 Quotes by Kate Atkinson

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?

If Bertie was a god (a favourite fantasy), she would be manufacturing things there was a shortage of - bees, tigers, dormice - not flip-flops and phone covers and toothpaste.

She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

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.

Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.