When Will There Be Good News? Quotes

“Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Just because something bad had happened to her doesn't mean it won't happen again.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Fine,’ she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from ‘I’m dying in anguish’ to ‘I’m experiencing euphoric joy.’ ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“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, When Will There Be Good News?

“Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. "Who said life was fair?" his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. ("It's not fair, Daddy.") Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“How wonderfully, joyously, untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, she didn't realize that childhood happiness dissolves away. If she had realized that Archie wasn't going to be that sunny innocent child for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Love. Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“First things were good, last things not so much so.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Laika,” she would say, “the first dog in space. She died of heat and stress after a few hours. She was rescued from an animal center, she must have thought she was going to a home, to a family, and instead they sent her to the loneliest death in the world.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Not his real home, his real home, the one he never named any more, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“It was just as well the baby was strapped into his high chair, because every so often he would suddenly fling out his arms and legs and try to launch himself into the air like a suicidal starfish.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Louise remembered that odd fluttery feeling of having a freewheeling baby inside you, independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“She didnt see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a raffle) where God picked out your chosen method of going—“Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let’s see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“You know there are no rules,” and Reggie said, “Really?” because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike with Ms. MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr. Hunter was very keen on. She said, “No, not those kinds of things, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn’t a template, a pattern that we’re supposed to follow. There’s no one watching us to see if we’re doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“she didn’t see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“She could have started up a branch library (or a spectacular house fire)”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“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.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“I don't actually live here," Reggie said.
"Who does live here then?"
"Ms. MacDonald, except that she doesn't because she's dead. Everyone's dead."
"I'm not," Jackson said. "You're not.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?