Life After Life
By Kate Atkinson
Summary
"On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization.
Wildly inventive, darkly comic, startlingly poignant — this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best, playing with time and history, telling a story that is breathtaking for both its audacity and its endless satisfactions."
-Goodreads.com
Quotations
What if some night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more”...Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “you are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
-Nietzche, The Gay Science
“Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly."
“ ‘We’re just cogs in a machine really, aren’t we?’ Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, ‘But remember without the cog there is no machine.’ “
-Nietzche, The Gay Science
“Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly."
“ ‘We’re just cogs in a machine really, aren’t we?’ Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, ‘But remember without the cog there is no machine.’ “