Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
10 quotes
"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."
"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."
"Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage."
"They were lucky. They'd been given history."
"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!"
"Popular versus literary—a false divide?"
"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."
"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."
"If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus."
"was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?"