Suited to live in a nineteenth-century novel

She felt like someone who'd lost her way and ended up in the wrong generation. She would have been much more sited to a period with structure and rank and rules, where a button undone on a glove signaled licentiousness. She could have managed quite well living within those kinds of strictures. She had read too much James and Wharton. No one in Edith Wharton's world really wanted to be there but Amelia would have got along fine inside an Edith Wharton novel. In fact, she could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 185.

He can write!

Bryan had shown him his manuscript, "the magnum opus" entitled The Last Bus Driver. "Well," Martin murmured politely when he returned it to Bryan, "it's certainly different. And you can write, there's no doubt about that." And he wasn't lying, Bryan could write, he could take a pen with turquoise ink in it and make big, loopy joined-up handwriting with verbs scattered randomly throughout sentences—sentences that in every comma and exclamation point screamed crazy. But Bryan knew where Martin lived and so he wasn't about to antagonize him.

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2006), p. 56.

Mesmerized by fire (and cable too)

Every evening since their arrival they had lit a fire and sat in front of the sitting-room hearth with the same kind of devotion that prehistoric people must have afforded flames, except that prehistoric people didn't have Victor's extensive cable package to entertain themselves with.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 113.

Canimorphizing people

If attributing human qualities to a dog is anthropomorphizing, then what do you call applying canine qualities to a person? Canimorphizing will do for now.
"If you were a dog, what do you think you would be?" Julia stuffed a large piece of cake into her mouth. "I don't know." Jackson shrugged. " A Labrador maybe?" and they had both, in unison, shouted, "No!" incredulously, as if he were insane even to contemplate being a Labrador. "You are so not a Labrador, Jackson," Julia said, "Labradors are pedestrian."

"Chocolate Labs aren't so bad," Amelia said. "It's the yellow ones that are. . . tedious."

"Chocolate Labradors." Julia laughed. "I always think you should be able to eat them."

"I think Mr. Brodie is an English pointer," Amelia said decisively.

. . .

"I don't think so," Julia said, after having mulled over the dog question (did they ever agree about anything?). "No, not a pointer. And certainly not an English one. Perhaps an Old Danish pointer. . . . But you know, Milly, I think Mr. Brodie is a German shepherd. You can just tell he would drag you out of a burning building or a river in flood. He would save you!"

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), pp. 158-59.

If I had the perfect study, then I'd be a writer

There was a small room at the top of the house, overlooking the garden, that Martin earmarked as a study. He felt it was the kind of room where he would be able to write something with strength and character, not the trite and formulaic Nina Riley but a text in which every page was a creative dialectic between passion and reason, a thing of life-changing artistry. Disappointingly, not only did this not happen but all the life he had sensed in the house disappeared after he purchased it.

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2006), p. 53.

The poor are priced out of housing in Cambridge (just as in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and plenty of other places)

Nowadays even houses houses that were back-to-backs with their front doors opening straight onto the street went for a fortune in the area. The poor moved out to the likes of Milton and Cherry Hinton, but now even the council estates there had been colonized by middle-class university types . . ., which must really piss the poor people off. The poor might always be with us, but Jackson was puzzled as to where they actually lived these days.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 64.

The awful realization in middle age that you're going to die one day

Jackson could remember when he was a kid and retired men were the old guys who tottered between the allotment and the corner of the pub. They had seemed like really old guys but maybe they weren't much older than he was now. Jackson was forty-five but felt much, much older. He was at that dangerous age when men suddenly notice that they're going to die eventually, inevitably, and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it, but that doesn't stop them from trying, whether it's shagging anything that moves or listening to early Bruce Springsteen and buying a top-of-the-range motorbike (a BMW K 1200 LT usually, thus considerably upping their chances of meeting death even earlier than anticipated). Then there were the guys who found themselves in the rut of routine alcoholic tedium—the lost and lonesome highway of your average beta male (his father's way). And then there was Jackson's own chosen path that led to the everyday Zen of a French house with its white stucco walls, geraniums in pots on the windowsills, a blue door, the paint peeling because who gives a damn about house maintenance in rural France?

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 75.

A life as dull as one's parents'

Gloria's parents led drab, listless lives that the wearing of pearl-and-gilt earrings and the reading of detective novels did little to enliven. Gloria presumed her life would be quite different–that glorious things would happen to her (as her name implied), that she would be illuminated within and without and her path would scorch like a comet's. This did not happen!

Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2006), p. 24.

Nutty "university types"

She seemed very distracted, even mildly deranged, but, living in Cambridge, Jackson had got used to university types, although she said she lived in "Oxford, not Cambridge. It's a completely different place," and Jackson had though, "Yeah, right," but said nothing.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 64.

Surrounded by vegetables, she wanted vegetables

From the window she could see the beginnings of her vegetable garden, neat drills of turned soil and geometric shapes marked out with pea sticks and string. Keith didn't understand why she had started a vegetable garden. "We're living on a bloody farm," he said, stretching his arms out expansively so he looked like a scarecrow—they were in a field at the time—the place is full of vegetables. We're allowed to take whatever we want." No, actually, the place was full of potatoes, which was different. And swede and kale—cattle food, peasant food. Michelle wanted courgettes and spinach and beetroot. And coriander.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 59.

The lovely life of a Cambridge lecturer's wife

When Victor proposed to her fourteen years ago, Rosemary had no idea what being the wife of a college lecturer would entail, but she had imagined it would involve wearing what her mother called "day dresses" and going to garden parties on the Backs and strolling elegantly across the plush green of the courts while people murmured, "That's the famous Victor Land's wife. He would be nothing without her, you know."

And, of course, the life of a lecturer's wife had turned out to be nothing like she had imagined. There were no garden parties on the Backs, and there was certainly no elegant strolling across the college courts, where the grass was afforded the kind of veneration usually associated with religious artifacts. Not long after she was first married she had been invited to join Victor in the Master's garden, where it soon grew apparent that Victor's colleagues were of the opinion that he had married (horribly) beneath him . . . . But one thing was true—Victor would be nothing without her, but he was also nothing with her. 

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004), p. 34.