About Kate Atkinson: Kate Atkinson is an English writer.
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness
Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.
Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men...
Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.
The simple rule: some get saved, but most don't. The choices are important before the years begin to go so very fast.
It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. 'Oh,' Izzie said, 'You're at an age when a girl is simply by the sublime.' Ursula wasn't sure what she meant ('No one is ever sure what she means,' Sylvie said) but she thought she ...
How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?
She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Crighton she had been teased endlessly by the idea of it, but with Ralph it was more straightforward. Again not love, more like the feelings you would have for a fa...
This was their third bar since Piccadilly and they were both agreed that the two of them were very drunk but had the capacity to get a good deal drunker yet.
I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn't want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? 'An educated woman,'Millie amended. 'An educated woman,' Ursula agreed.
And then suddenly she was on her feet, her heart knocking in her chest, a sudden familiar but long-forgotten terror triggered- but by what?
finally she feels free - not perfect, not problem free, just free
Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.
History is all about 'what ifs
You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.
The mind is a fathomless mystery.
Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?
We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.” ...
He had taken a few days' leave from his army training and they had taken refuge in the Charing Cross Hotel while an unexploded bomb in the Strand was being dealt with. They could hear the naval guns that had been stationed on trolleys between Vauxhal...
They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sens...
