All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination. And this one is Teddy's.

— Kate Atkinson

Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute governesses. Or — preferably — the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —

— Kate Atkinson

...and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something in return. Except for one's husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.

— Kate Atkinson

And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.

— Kate Atkinson

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

— Kate Atkinson

... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.

— Kate Atkinson

But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country - The Rest Of My Life.

— Kate Atkinson

Get down,' Bounty says grimly. 'Mummy's thinking.' (Although what Mummy's actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out, and she could start again.)

— Kate Atkinson

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time, but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

— Kate Atkinson

He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good, quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. Quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.

— Kate Atkinson