The voices / 57 fragments

Kate Atkinson

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗life time justice friendship mind death truth knowledge

Archive entries

01Undated

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 / quote

02Undated

Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. 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." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion.

Kate Atkinson / quote

03Undated

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 / quote

04Undated

Pam wasn't what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.

Kate Atkinson / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

Get down,' Bunty 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 / quote

07Undated

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

Kate Atkinson / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

Kate Atkinson / quote

11Undated

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

Kate Atkinson / quote

12Undated

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 / quote

13Undated

The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree......The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.

Kate Atkinson / quote

14Undated

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

Kate Atkinson / quote

15Undated

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?

Kate Atkinson / quote

16Undated

Pamela produced placid babies. "They don't tend to turn feral until they're two," she said.

Kate Atkinson / quote

17Undated

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 / quote

18Undated

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 / quote

19Undated

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

Kate Atkinson / quote

20Undated

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

Kate Atkinson / quote

21Undated

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

Kate Atkinson / quote

22Undated

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

Kate Atkinson / quote

23Undated

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

Kate Atkinson / quote

24Undated

What would I put in my bottom drawer? – I would put only sharp objects, the clean lines of broken glass, the honed steel of paring knives, the tiny saw-teeth of bread knives and the soothing edges of razor blades, I weigh knives in my hands like strange comforters.

Kate Atkinson / quote