Kate Atkinson · 400 pages
Rating: (30.2K votes)
“Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.”
“A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen”
“Just because something bad had happened to her doesn't mean it won't happen again.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“First things were good, last things not so much so.”
“A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t.”
“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.”
“She didnt see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more.”
“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.”
“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.”
“every increased possession loads us with weariness, and he’s right.” There”
“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.”
“Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.”
“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.”
“I don't want to stay in the bad place, where no one believes in silver linings or love or happy endings.”
“Tam Lin says rabbits give up when they're caught by coyotes [...]. He says they consent to die because their animals and can't understand hope. But humans are different. They fight against death no matter how bad things seem, and sometimes, even when everything's against them, they win.”
“I was in Chicago before I came here, but I didn’t do so very much dancing. I had to work.” He was thinking how such girls as she had everything, as contrasted with girls like Roberta, who had nothing. And yet, as he now felt in this instance, he liked Roberta better. She was sweeter and warmer and kinder—not so cold.”
“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. ”
“In 1999 the RAND Corporation published a report (the first and, so far, last of its kind) with a “conservative estimate” that more than 307 million tissue samples from more than 178 million people were stored in the United States alone. This number, the report said, was increasing by more than 20 million samples each year. The samples come from routine medical procedures, tests, operations, clinical trials, and research donations. They sit in lab freezers, on shelves, or in industrial vats of liquid nitrogen. They’re stored at military facilities, the FBI, and the National Institutes of Health.”
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