Home > Work > A God in Ruins (Todd Family, #2)
101 " (‘Why did you have children?’ Bertie asked, later in their lives. ‘Was it just the biological imperative to breed?’ ‘That’s why everyone has children,’ Viola said. ‘They just dress it up as something more sentimental.’) Viola "
― Kate Atkinson , A God in Ruins (Todd Family, #2)
102 " It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. "
103 " Art is anything created by one person and enjoyed by another. "
104 " genuine sentiment rather than just nostalgia, always a bit of a cheap emotion "
105 " Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists. When "
106 " We’re dying from the moment we’re born, "
107 " A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother. "
108 " People have the wrong idea about fairy tales, they think they’re about being rescued by handsome princes, whereas really they’re like Girl Guide handbooks. "
109 " What on earth was she doing with her life? Could she just get up and leave? "
110 " The gods were on the point of giving up when Brahma said, 'I know where we will hide man's divinity, we will hide it inside him. he will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within. "
111 " Popular versurs literary—a false divide? "
112 " There was just a beautiful, unearthly silence. He thought of the wood and the bluebells, the owl and the fox, a Hornby train trundling around his bedroom floor, the smell of a cake baking in the oven. The skylark ascending on his thread of song. F-Fox "
113 " It’s the side of reason that I’m on,” Teddy said. “It just so happens that that’s where you’re always to be found and my mother rarely. "
114 " that one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the "
115 " the hospital. He was the youthful partner of an older doctor "
116 " And when all else is gone, Art remains. "
117 " suspected everyone did—from Winnie, the least pulchritudinous, "
118 " He noticed that Ursula’s ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. "
119 " the grain had entered the shell (Sylvie’s own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company. His "
120 " Viola hadn’t seen Sunny for nearly ten years and in the interim he had turned into a complete human being. (“Perhaps the two things aren’t unrelated,” Bertie said.) "