He inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.

— Kate Atkinson

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.

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

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.

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

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.

— Kate Atkinson

It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.

— Kate Atkinson

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

— Kate Atkinson