Quotes from When Will There Be Good News?

“Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“Just because something bad had happened to her doesn't mean it won't happen again.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. "Who said life was fair?" his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. ("It's not fair, Daddy.") Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“Fine,’ she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from ‘I’m dying in anguish’ to ‘I’m experiencing euphoric joy.’ ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“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 sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“First things were good, last things not so much so.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“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.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“She didnt see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“I don't actually live here," Reggie said.
"Who does live here then?"
"Ms. MacDonald, except that she doesn't because she's dead. Everyone's dead."
"I'm not," Jackson said. "You're not.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“every increased possession loads us with weariness, and he’s right.” There”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. “Gone,” she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. “Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

“Love. Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from When Will There Be Good News?

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“Is that what you would do?"
He stared at me and I waited, wondering why his answer mattered so much.
"I wouldn't have waited this long for you. I would have already showed up at your dorm the minute you decided I wanted you. I wouldn't leave until I convinced you that you were mine.”
― Sophie Jordan, quote from Foreplay

“believe the copy of this e-book you are reading”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Beautiful Mystery

“Let us imagine a coming generation with such intrepidity of vision, with such a heroic penchant for the tremendous; let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the proud audacity with which they turn their back on all the weakling's doctrines of optimism in order to 'live resolutely' in wholeness and fullness: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of such a culture, in view of his self-education for seriousness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, to desire tragedy as his own proper Helen, and to exclaim with Faust:

Should not my longing overleap the distance
And draw the fairest form into existence?"

"Would it not be necessary?"--No, thrice no! O you young romantics: it would not be necessary! But it is highly probably that it will end that way, that you end that way--namely, "comforted," as it is written, in spite of all self-education for seriousness and terror, "comforted metaphysically"--in sum, as romantics end, as Christians.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner

“In the newly sighted, learning to see demands a radical change in neurological functioning and, with it, a radical change in psychological functioning, in self, in identity. The change may be experienced in literally life-and-death terms. Valvo quotes a patient of his as saying, 'One must die as a sighted person to be bom again as a blind person,' and the opposite is equally true: one must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

“Until very recent times, few black Americans have regarded the African connection as a major theme in their lives. David Walker, in his 1829 Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World, said of America, "This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country". "No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward the colored people of this country", wrote the great Frederick Douglass, "than that which makes Africa, not America, their home. It is that wolfish idea that elbows us off the sidewalk, and denies us the rights of citizenship". When the freedmen after emancipation chose last names, they took not African names but the names of American heroes--Washington, Jefferson, Clay, Lincoln. "Centuries of residence, centuries of toil, centuries of suffering have made us American", a black high-school principal in Ohio said in 1874. "In language, in civilization, in fears, and in hopes we are Americans".”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society

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