Emotionally Weird Quotes

“Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“Personally, I don’t think it right to make up things about real people—although I suppose there’s an argument for saying that once you’re dead you’re not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first-class honours, or both).”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,’ Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“Nor, says Nora, do we want commonplace tales of hausfrau Angst, of the woman heroically making over her life with a handsome new lover, a beautiful child, a happy ending. Instead, we shall have murder and mayhem, plots and sub-plots, a mad woman in the attic, purloined diamonds, lost birthrights, heroic dogs, a soupçon of sex, a suspicion of philosophy.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“The house is full of the mouldering relics of a more complex, more opulent life – the huge silk umbrellas like marquees that rot in the outsized yellow dragon Chinese vases in the vestibule, the complicated deckchairs with canopies and footrests whose green canvas is worn so pale and thin that they can barely take the weight of a field mouse. In cupboards and trunks and outhouses there lurk decaying galoshes, sou’westers and rubberized macs, ancient shotguns and fishing-rods and nets. On disintegrating dressing-tables the bristles of enamel-backed brushes have caught the hair of people who are all now dead.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“She seemed to have no inkling that life wasn't as orderly as her pencil case and that everything is chance and at any moment any number of remarkable things can happen that are totally beyond our control, events that rip up our maps and re-polarize our compasses - the madwoman walking towards us, the train falling off the bridge, the boy on the bicycle.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“His hair was dark, his skin pale, his lashes long, and you might have thought that his lips – carved into a curving pout by Cupid himself and slightly damp from sleep – were waiting to be kissed. But I didn’t do that, because that would have been like asking for trouble instead of simply waiting for it to arrive in its own good time.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“She was reading Gormenghast, very slowly and deliberately in the way that lone diners in restaurants read.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“other. I managed to read one that said. ‘What’s a superego?’ Written down, it looked very odd, like a sauce for spaghetti or a musical tempo mark – spiritoso, sforzando, superego. My headache was growing worse. I wished I had an Anadin (a rather poetic cry of pain). I was too tired to concentrate.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“Driving a hearse didn’t worry him, Robin explained (although nobody had asked him to), because being a Buddhist he was phlegmatic about death, ‘Because I know I’ll come back.’ ‘What as?’ Terri asked. ‘A protozoa?’ ‘I think you’ll find,’ Robin said, ‘that protozoa is a plural form, it would have to be protozoon.’ Perhaps Robin was on such a tedious karmic journey that he would just come back as himself. I’m sure it was no coincidence that his name was almost an anagram of ‘boring’. ‘Reincarnation,”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“I asked for text. Do you understand what text is?’ You could tell that she wanted to slip the word ‘morons’ into this sentence somewhere. ‘Well, according to Proust,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully, ‘it’s a web.’ Professor Cousins hadn’t even managed a sentence, despite all his diagrams. ‘Does this mean,’ he asked Martha plaintively, ‘that I should abandon all hope of becoming a writer?’ ‘Yes,’ Martha said. ‘Thank goodness for that,’ Professor Cousins said. ‘Let’s turn to your assignments,’ Martha said tetchily. *”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“It’s never too late,’ I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“Archie was talking. Nothing will stop Archie talking, not even death probably, he will rumble on from the inside of his large coffin until the worms get fed up with the noise and eat his tongue –”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird

“Terri would have made the perfect wife for Bob – they could have simply slept their way through married life. Rip van Winkle and Duchess Anaesthesia, the lost, sleepy daughter of the Romanovs.”
― Kate Atkinson, Emotionally Weird