Life After Life Quotes

“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“He was born a politician.
No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education…”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said.
"Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Become such as you are, having learned what that is.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.”
“And if we are killed?”
“Then others must remember us.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Why is everything an 'adventure' with you?" Sylvie said irritably to Izzie."

"Because life is an adventure, of course."

"I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” Klara said. “If we all had it there would be no history to write about.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win is for enough good women to do nothing.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“...but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Kittens were in continual abundance on the farm, there was a kind of kitten currency in the neighborhood, they were bartered for all kinds of emotional regret or fulfillment by parents - a doll lost, an exam passed.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Scars heal,” Sylvie said. “Even the worst ones.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there." It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life