Top 100 Kate Atkinson Quotes
#1. Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.
Kate Atkinson
#2. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)
Kate Atkinson
#3. 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.
Kate Atkinson
#4. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Kate Atkinson
#5. It's been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.
Kate Atkinson
#6. Fine,' she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from 'I'm dying in anguish' to 'I'm experiencing euphoric joy.' 'Fine,' she said. 'I'm fine.
Kate Atkinson
#7. Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire.
Kate Atkinson
#8. ... how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be if it were her own child? Perhaps too strong to bear.
Kate Atkinson
#9. ("An eye for an eye," Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)
Kate Atkinson
#10. Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention.
Kate Atkinson
#11. ... the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.
Kate Atkinson
#12. She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.
Kate Atkinson
#13. Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
Kate Atkinson
#14. When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape.
Kate Atkinson
#15. I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
#16. Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
Kate Atkinson
#17. He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep - no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.
Kate Atkinson
#18. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.
Kate Atkinson
#19. You walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.
Kate Atkinson
#20. It wasn't fair, he thought peevishly. "Who said life was fair?" his father had said to him a hundred times. He had said the same himself to his own daughter. ("It's not fair, Daddy.") Parents were miserable buggers. It SHOULD be fair. It should be paradise.
Kate Atkinson
#21. You can't change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present. That's what they said.
Kate Atkinson
#22. She ... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman ...
Kate Atkinson
#23. You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty's, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean.
Kate Atkinson
#24. She ... wanted no one - apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of 'unattainable.
Kate Atkinson
#25. That one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the
Kate Atkinson
#26. Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.
Kate Atkinson
#27. Anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense
Kate Atkinson
#28. The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
Kate Atkinson
#29. Do you keep time in the same place that you save it? If so why is it always so difficult to find? It must be in a very safe place.
Kate Atkinson
#30. Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing.
Kate Atkinson
#31. Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving.
Kate Atkinson
#32. I feel as if I'm waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
Kate Atkinson
#34. 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.
Kate Atkinson
#35. War did indeed make strange bedfellows of people.
Kate Atkinson
#36. There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening,
Kate Atkinson
#37. It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.
Kate Atkinson
#39. If he hadn't been the father of her children, Viola might have admired Dominic for the way he was so easily able to absolve himself of all obligation simply by asserting his right to self-fulfilment.
Kate Atkinson
#40. I dreamt of going on the stage once," he said, looking crestfallen. "It's never too late," I said vaguely. A lie, of course, as often, unfortunately, it is much too late.
Kate Atkinson
#41. She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
Kate Atkinson
#42. She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.
Kate Atkinson
#43. (" 'Sacrifice,' " Sylvie said, "is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.") But,
Kate Atkinson
#44. And I can't cry, I don't even want to cry. My tears would never do justice to this loss.
Kate Atkinson
#45. They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge.
Kate Atkinson
#46. A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body.
Kate Atkinson
#47. There was always a second before the siren started when she was aware of a sound as yet unheard. It was like an echo, or rather the opposite of an echo. An echo came afterwards, but was there a word for what came before?
Kate Atkinson
#48. First things were good, last things not so much so.
Kate Atkinson
#49. The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say.
Kate Atkinson
#50. Royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky's outfit he actually made it seem strangely distinguished. Howell
Kate Atkinson
#51. I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.
Kate Atkinson
#52. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't.
Kate Atkinson
#53. There was a stiff bell-pull instead of a doorbell that Teddy had to yank hard for any result. They could hear a faint ringing somewhere beyond the fortress-like front door. No footsteps of anyone rushing to open it. It was a house in mourning, Teddy supposed.
Kate Atkinson
#54. Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing for her beliefs.
Kate Atkinson
#55. I'm always so glad,' Sylvie murmured, 'that I don't have to take a turn at being other people.'
'You're very good at being yourself,' Ursula said, aware that it didn't necessarily sound like a compliment.
'Well, I've had years of practice.
Kate Atkinson
#56. Martin couldn't imagine a world where there was no time to read.
Kate Atkinson
#57. The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself. SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD
Kate Atkinson
#58. The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.
Kate Atkinson
#59. I had an idea of him,' Ursula said, 'but the idea wasn't him. Perhaps I wanted to fall in love.
Kate Atkinson
#60. Those fateful words We are now at war with Germany, and for several hours felt strangely numb. She tried to phone Pamela
Kate Atkinson
#62. A woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head.
Kate Atkinson
#63. It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.
Kate Atkinson
#64. My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
Kate Atkinson
#65. The "eat" part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.
Kate Atkinson
#66. Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.
Kate Atkinson
#67. Life's random," he said. "The best you can do is pick up the pieces.
Kate Atkinson
#68. I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.
Kate Atkinson
#69. Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed.
Kate Atkinson
#70. If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.
Kate Atkinson
#71. In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
Kate Atkinson
#72. I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.
Kate Atkinson
#73. Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
Kate Atkinson
#74. a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. Ursula
Kate Atkinson
#75. The reason she had taken the long way round was on the unlikely chance that she might engineer an "accidental" meeting with Benjamin Cole.
Kate Atkinson
#76. She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.
Kate Atkinson
#77. She supposed she was a little cog in the big wheel of Empire. "Nothing wrong with being a cog," Maurice said, himself now a big wheel in the Home Office. "The world needs cogs.
Kate Atkinson
#79. Teddy found himself thinking what a decent human being his father had been, the best of all the family really. The grief caught him unawares.
Kate Atkinson
#80. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like an abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already in another life.
Kate Atkinson
#82. How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. "One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs," she said to Ursula.
Kate Atkinson
#83. Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly.
Kate Atkinson
#84. It was the enormity of war, she thought, it left you scrabbling for ways to think about it. Bridget
Kate Atkinson
#86. Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all
a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
Kate Atkinson
#87. It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was.
Kate Atkinson
#88. The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense.
Kate Atkinson
#89. All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win is for enough good women to do nothing.
Kate Atkinson
#90. I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters.
Kate Atkinson
#91. Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.
Kate Atkinson
#92. Love at first sight, she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren't 'true' love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness.
Kate Atkinson
#93. People who live on their own do tend to witter. We live without restraint, verbal at any rate.' Nigel
Kate Atkinson
#94. Love. Love wasn't sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn't patient, love wasn't kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.
Kate Atkinson
#95. So, what do they pay you for ... exactly?"
Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things."
"What kind of things?"
"You know."
No, I can't even begin to imagine."
"Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog."
"Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?
Kate Atkinson
#96. If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.
Kate Atkinson
#97. Trying to restore some kind of natural balance of humors in the world.
Kate Atkinson
#98. Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
Kate Atkinson
#99. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
Kate Atkinson
#100. When I'm writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can't read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.
Kate Atkinson
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