Lucy Atkins > Quotes

“People are all the same, really. The one thing you can rely on is that they will behave exactly as you feared they might.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“It is, I’ve realized, entirely possible to hold two realities in one’s mind simultaneously, and to believe them both at a visceral level.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“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

“People used to hide things under the floorboards to distract the evil spirits, so they wouldn’t hurt the family. A sort of decoy.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“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

“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

“Jackdaws are bold and inquisitive birds, the narcissists of myth and folklore, capable of devious plotting and devoted to thievery. Their collective noun is a ‘clattering’.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“But what will not ambition and revenge Descend to?’ John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Nine”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“I felt my stomach lurch as if the bus had gone over a precipice.”
― 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

“It is a failing of mine that when something interests me, I find it extremely difficult to stop talking once I have started.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“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

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

“But while she was busy polishing the outside, the inside had rotted away. She put make-up on, covering her feverish skin with foundation and lining her already darkened eyes.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“There was a bunch of pale pink peonies in a tin jug on the table. Peonies are her favourite flower. They stand for ‘shame’ in the Victorian language of flowers”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“The collective noun for pigeons is a ‘passel’, an indefinite quantity, uncountable, impossible to pin down.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

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

“Whilst never submissive, she certainly cares too much what people think of her – a single harsh comment can derail and preoccupy her. She is highly ambitious, though she disguises that well, from herself as much as from others.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

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

“Of course, the human brain is biologically wired for trickery; we must be alert to the unseen threat. Our capacity for visitations, chimeras and frights is a perfectly sensible evolutionary by-product.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“collective nouns. I used to make lists of them: a watch of nightingales, a stare of owls, a mutation of thrushes, a murder of crows. I look at my hollow oak and I think of all the life teeming inside her, unseen, concealed, unappreciated but vital.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“Everything was moving so fast that bits of her mind were coming loose and flying off.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor

“It’s dangerous to share a bed with your baby if you or your partner: → are smokers (no matter where or when you smoke)”
― Lucy Atkins, First-Time Parent: The honest guide to coping brilliantly and staying sane in your baby’s first year

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

“She hated children. Loved dogs, though. Terribly British of her.”
― Lucy Atkins, The Night Visitor