Started Early, Took My Dog Quotes

“Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“This Jackson bloke was the ruddy Scarlet Pimpernel, here, there and everywhere, always one step ahead of Barry. And everywhere he went, women were disappearing.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“... the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“This was love. It didn't come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Courtney was astonishingly reckless. A kid without reck was a dangerous thing. Other children in the play park yelled and screamed and laughed but Courtney was merely determined to test everything, including herself, to the limits, like a dogged little crash-test dummy.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“He caught the look on her face, a mixture of distaste and confusion which eventually resolved into something more cryptic. Women usually needed to be acquainted with him a little longer before he saw that expression on their faces.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie. On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names - Eleanor, Lucy, Anna, Charlotte.Jackson wondered how you decided on a name for a room. Or a doll. Or a child, for that matter. The naming of dogs seemed even more perplexing.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty's, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Ladies who lurch.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let’s face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked when Jackson took his own phone out of his pocket. Another chippy woman, Jackson thought with a sigh. Chippy women wherever he went. Chippy mothers who begat chippy daughters and so the circle of chippiness was unbroken.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Chevaunne. C-h-e-v-a-u-n-n-e, I have to spell it every time, it’s a fucking pain. It’s Irish.” At least the girl could spell, even if it was only her own misspelled name. Kelly Cross was so thick she couldn’t even spell “Siobhan”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn’t really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“After Marlee was born they rented videos and fell asleep in front of them. Now, like so much else in Jackson's world, videos were obsolete.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“There was a quantum second of silence, counting for nothing in one dimension and stretching to infinity in another. In the balance between triumph and disaster”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Cook was a Yorkshireman, naturally.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Hope” is the thing with feathers— That perches in the soul— And sings the tune without the words— And never stops—at all— And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard— And sore must be the storm That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm— I’ve heard it in the chillest land— And on the strangest Sea— Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb—of Me. Emily Dickinson”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Families weren’t always such great places to be, especially for kids.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Fiction had never been Jackson’s thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“You can’t change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“This was love. It didn’t come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog