Popular versus literary—a false divide?

— Kate Atkinson

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.

— Kate Atkinson

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

— Kate Atkinson

She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.

— Kate Atkinson

She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.

— Kate Atkinson

She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies, and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.

— Kate Atkinson

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

— Kate Atkinson

She was tremendously fond of Ralph. Not hounded by love the way some women were. With Brighton 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 favorite dog (and, no, she would never have said such a thing to him. Some people, a lot of people, didn't understand how attached one could be to a dog.)

— Kate Atkinson

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 they were supposed to become.

— Kate Atkinson

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

— Kate Atkinson