Magpie Lane Quotes

“Reading isn’t a one-way process. (…) it isn’t just the author’s thoughts pouring into your brain. It’s a dialogue between you and the author, and you and all the other readers of the same work, past, present and future.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“This nightly farrago seemed to me to embody the entire narcissistic psychopathy of Oxford: a city mired in the past, saturated with self-importance.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“I felt my stomach lurch as if the bus had gone over a precipice.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“Damage is only damage, after all, when it is observed.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“Anger’s a boomerang, Dee, it only comes back to knock you down.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“I tend not to say I’m teetotal. People make such a boring fuss about it.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“but I of all people do not believe in a benevolent deity or a universe that provides. In my experience, quite the opposite is true.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“It struck me, as I looked at her coloured sheet, that the bond between a mother and child works a bit like the Penrose tiles: a pattern of different, unbreakable interactions between two distinct but related shapes that stretches to infinity. No forced separation – not even death – can destroy it, because it operates according to a logic that exists independent of geography, or time.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“I counted the stairs as I went up them – sixteen treads – two to the power four.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane

“He pitched sideways – I turned, he twisted – I shot out both hands to catch him and for a second we stood face to face, strangers dancing on a mathematical bridge at dawn.”
― Lucy Atkins, Magpie Lane