Margot Portal > Margot's Quotes

“Chicago: "where the great Lake Michigan shines on and on, every rolling wave a sparkling phalanx of freshwater foam hustling on to crash against the shore”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“Sing like you've got no audience, sing like you don't know what a critic is, sing about your hometown, sing about your prom, sing about deer, sing about the seasons, sing about your mother, sing about chainsaws, sing about the thaw, sing about the rivers, sing about forests, sing about the prairies. But whatever you do, start singing early in the morning, if only just to keep warm. And if you happen to live in a warm beautiful place …

Move to Wisconsin. Buy a wood stove, and spend a week splitting wood. It worked for me.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“Here, I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“as I watched their approach I wondered whether the slow pace of a wedding march was for the benefit of a bride on her most beautiful day, or for the aging father preparing to give her away.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“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, A God in Ruins

“She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“They had been awestruck not only at the sight of the Alps by moonlight but by the depthless inky-black skies, pricked with thousands upon thousands of stars—bright seed broadcast by some generous god, Teddy thought, drifting dangerously close to the forsaken realm of poetry. There were sunsets and dawns of thrilling grandeur and once, on a run to Bochum, a spectacular show that the Northern Lights put on for them—a vibrating curtain of colours draped in the sky that had left them searching for superlatives. In”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

“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, A God in Ruins

“This is my Lost Property cupboard theory of the afterlife -

when we die we are taken to a great lost property cupboard where all the things we have ever lost have been kept for us - every hairgrip, every button and pencil, every tooth, every earring and key, every key, every pin.

All the library books, all the cats that never came back, all the coins, all the watches (which will still be keeping time for us).

And perhaps, too, the other less tangible things - tempers and patience (perhaps Patricia´s virginity will be there), religion, meaning, innocence and oceans of time.”
― Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

“Everyone has left something here – the unnamed tribes, the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Normans and all those who came after, they have all left their lost property – the buttons and fans, the rings and torques, the bullae and fibulae. The riverbank winks momentarily with a thousand, zillion, million pins. A trick of the light. The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door. Pg486”
― Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

“Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Home’, it had struck her on the torturous drive back to London, wasn’t Egerton Gardens, wasn’t even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Ah, I know," Bridget said. "For sure, you have the sixth sense." Mrs. Glover, wrestling with the plum pudding, snorted her disapproval. She was of the opinion that five senses were too many, let alone adding on another.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Of course, I don’t believe in God,’ Dr Kellet said. ‘But I believe in heaven. One has to,”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life: A Novel

“Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb...and said to his mother, "Can you tidy it up a bit back there?”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“Juliet felt slighted yet relieved. It was curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord. She felt an odd pang at the sight of him. She had been fond of him. She had been his girl. Reader, I didn’t marry him, she thought.”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“Perhaps sex was something you had to learn and then stick at until you were good at it, like hockey or the piano. But an initial lesson would be helpful.”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“hooligan posse of gulls wheeled noisily overhead,”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“Her éducation sexuelle (it was easier to think of it as something French) was woefully riddled with lacunae.”
― Kate Atkinson, Transcription

“Phaeton’s sisters who mourned so much for their charred brother that they turned into trees – imagine their feelings as they found their feet were fast to the earth, turning, even as they looked, into roots. When they tore their hair they found their hands were full, not of hair, but of leaves. Their legs were trapped inside tree-trunks, their arms formed branches and they watched in horror as bark crept over their breasts and stomachs. Clymene, their poor mother, frantically trying to pull the bark off her daughters, instead snapped their fragile branches and her tree-daughters cried out to her in pain and terror, begging her not to hurt them any more.”
― Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet

“Je suis désolé,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“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, Case Histories

“She'd had a glimpse of a possible future-the pretty cottage, the garden full of flowers and vegetables, bread in the oven, a bowl of strawberries on the table, the happy baby hitched on her hip while she threw corn to the chickens. It would be like a Hardy novel before it all goes wrong.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Parenting is like writing, most people just make it up as they go along.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends — 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland — she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“continually amazed at just how many skills and crafts could go into making “a lovely home”—the patchwork quilts you could sew, the curtains you could ruffle, the cucumbers you could pickle, the rhubarb you could make into jam, the icing-sugar decorations you could create for your Christmas cake—which you were supposed to make in September at the latest (for heaven’s sake)—and at the same time remember to plant your indoor bulbs so they would also be ready for “the festive season,” and it just went on and on, every month a list of tasks that would have defeated Hercules and that was without the everyday preparation of meals,”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“No woman was ever truly safe. It didn’t matter if you were as tough as Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 because wherever you went there were men.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories