Case Histories Quotes

“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, Case Histories

“It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened - how did you live life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a strength and courage that most people didn't have.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“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

“Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“The only time you were safe was when you were dead.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Olivia was her only beautiful child. Julia, with her dark curls and snub nose, was pretty but her character wasn't, Sylvia --- poor Sylvia, what could you say? And Amelia was somehow ...bland, but Olivia, Olivia was spun from light. It seemed impossible that she was Victor's child, although, unfortunately, there was no doubting the fact. Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. Everything was from duty, nothing from love. Duty killed you in the end.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“[T]he parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with cherries on top. And chocolate shavings and those little silver balls that cracked your fillings.”
― 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

“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

“That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers.”
― 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

“The plot thickens,” he said, and wished he hadn’t said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. “I think we have a suspect.” That didn’t sound much better. “My house has just exploded, by the way.” At least that was novel.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“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, Case Histories

“Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Boys took a long time to become men but daughters were women from the kickoff.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Right up until the end, Victor’s mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there—a five-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver—would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn’t lay your hands on.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they’re going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn’t a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn’t stop them from trying, whether it’s shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated).”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories