1
He inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.Kate Atkinson
2
They were lucky. They'd been given history.Kate Atkinson
3
The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree... The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word, ' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.Kate Atkinson
4
And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!Kate Atkinson
5
Popular versus literary–a false divide?Kate Atkinson
6
All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination. And this one is Teddy's.Kate Atkinson
7
Oh, man, ‘the nursery, ’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“ You do have kids, ” his kid said.“ Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.Kate Atkinson
8
If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.Kate Atkinson
9
Was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?Kate Atkinson
10
Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.Kate Atkinson
11
Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.Kate Atkinson