Top 100 Kate Atkinson Quotes
#1. I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.
Ian Rankin
#2. I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.
Jojo Moyes
#3. Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes.
Harlan Coben
#4. I adore Kate Atkinson, her literary as well as her crime output.
Paula Hawkins
#5. Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.
Kate Atkinson
#6. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.)
Kate Atkinson
#7. If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
Kate Atkinson
#8. 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
#10. If there was one thing she found more tedious than thinking about politics it was talking about politics.
Kate Atkinson
#11. He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer.
Kate Atkinson
#12. White lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.
Kate Atkinson
#13. 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
#14. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.
Kate Atkinson
#15. There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky.
Kate Atkinson
#16. Nancy fell in love with Viola at first sight of her. A coup de foudre, she said, more intense and overwhelming than any form of romantic love. Mother and daughter were each a world to the other, complete and unassailable.
Kate Atkinson
#17. He was one of those people who stared at you with a meaningful smile on their face, as if he was somehow intellectually and spiritually superior, when the fact was he was simply socially inept.
Kate Atkinson
#18. The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
#19. It's been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.
Kate Atkinson
#20. The last thing she wanted was people looking for her. No, that wasn't true
the last thing she wanted was people finding her.
Kate Atkinson
#21. The aircraft found the ground before Teddy did and he watched as it exploded in a glittery starburst of light. He would live, he realized. There would be an afterward after all. He gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him.
Kate Atkinson
#22. When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.
Kate Atkinson
#23. I think I would rather just live my life," Teddy said, "not make an artifice of it.
Kate Atkinson
#24. Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light-
Kate Atkinson
#25. This is Martin Canning, Neil. He's written a wonderful book." "Fantastic," Neil Winters said, shaking Martin's hand. His hand was damp and soft and made Martin think of something dead you might pick up on the beach. "The first of many, I
Kate Atkinson
#26. 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
#27. Love of fate?" "It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.
Kate Atkinson
#28. She didnt see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more.
Kate Atkinson
#29. Was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?
Kate Atkinson
#30. And then suddenly she was on her feet, her heart knocking in her chest, a sudden familiar but long-forgotten terror triggered- but by what?
Kate Atkinson
#31. Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire.
Kate Atkinson
#32. Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.
Kate Atkinson
#33. ... 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
#34. The hospital. He was the youthful partner of an older doctor
Kate Atkinson
#35. She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.
Kate Atkinson
#36. ("An eye for an eye," Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)
Kate Atkinson
#37. Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention.
Kate Atkinson
#38. Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird's heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted,
Kate Atkinson
#39. Being kind modified the extraordinary, alarming otherness of him, which was threefold - large, male and American.
Kate Atkinson
#40. strangers? Millie's swan song on the stage, the last
Kate Atkinson
#41. Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours
Kate Atkinson
#42. My work is not my life. I started writing quite late, I didn't have that 'writing is everything, my art is all.' You have to be able to recognise the difference between the two.
Kate Atkinson
#43. A simple acceptance of what comes to us, regarding it as neither bad nor good.
"Werde, der du bist, as he would have it," Dr Kellet continued ... "It means become who you are," he said.
Kate Atkinson
#44. She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.
Kate Atkinson
#45. The college was run by a man called Mr. Carver whose lifelong passions were Esperanto and Pitman's shorthand, the latter more useful than the former.
Kate Atkinson
#46. Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn't really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs.
Kate Atkinson
#47. Good news?' Gloria queried. She wondered if Emily was pregnant again (was that good news?), so she was taken aback when Emily said, 'I've found Jesus.' 'Oh,' Gloria said. 'Where was he?
Kate Atkinson
#48. ... the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.
Kate Atkinson
#49. Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let's face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.
Kate Atkinson
#50. She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.
Kate Atkinson
#51. If she had been in charge of designing the human race she would have gone about things differently. (A golden shaft of light through the ear for conception perhaps and a well-fitting hatch somewhere modest for escape nine months later.)
Kate Atkinson
#52. They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox ("Naturally," Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf ("Honiahaka" in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shawcross herself was Great White Eagle ("Oh, for heaven's sake," Sylvie said, "talk about hubris").
Kate Atkinson
#53. Just because something bad had happened to her doesn't mean it won't happen again.
Kate Atkinson
#54. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.
Kate Atkinson
#55. That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt.
Kate Atkinson
#56. Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart.
Kate Atkinson
#57. Could you be an old maid if you had worn the scarlet letter?
Kate Atkinson
#58. Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
Kate Atkinson
#59. Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?
Kate Atkinson
#60. Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance.
Kate Atkinson
#61. When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape.
Kate Atkinson
#63. This was beauty too. Was there anything in nature that wasn't?
Kate Atkinson
#64. Home ... wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.
Kate Atkinson
#65. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot.
Kate Atkinson
#66. I don't think I'd mind working on a cheese counter. It would leave my mind free to do whatever it wanted - which is nothing in particular, it's true, but I like being alone in my head, I'm used to it.
Kate Atkinson
#67. When I started 'Case Histories,' the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called 'Embarkation.' It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but it mushroomed into an entire book.
Kate Atkinson
#68. I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
#69. She made 'pig' sound like a much worse word than it was. Pigs were quite nice.
Kate Atkinson
#70. Daddy said he would rather we were alive and cowards than dead and heroes.
Kate Atkinson
#71. Ursula found herself dwelling on Hugh's death, his absence more than his death.
Kate Atkinson
#72. They were both Filipino and laughed no matter what you said. Were the Philippines really such a happy place or were the carers just happy not to be there?
Kate Atkinson
#75. Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
Kate Atkinson
#76. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. A monkish thought that he dismissed.
Kate Atkinson
#77. Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
Kate Atkinson
#78. Sylvie considered that children should be toughened up early, the better to take the blows in later life.
Kate Atkinson
#79. feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She'd just
Kate Atkinson
#80. He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep - no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.
Kate Atkinson
#81. She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down - something that was chasing her down.
Kate Atkinson
#82. Sweet sixteen," Hugh said, kissing her affectionately. "Happy birthday, little bear. Your future's all ahead of you." Ursula still harbored the feeling that some of her future was also behind her but she had learned not to voice such things.
Kate Atkinson
#83. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.
Kate Atkinson
#84. Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place.
Kate Atkinson
#85. She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.
Kate Atkinson
#86. He caught the look on her face, a mixture of distaste and confusion which eventually resolved into something more cryptic. Women usually needed to be acquainted with him a little longer before he saw that expression on their faces.
Kate Atkinson
#87. Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
Kate Atkinson
#88. You walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.
Kate Atkinson
#89. 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
#90. Bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something
Kate Atkinson
#91. They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
Kate Atkinson
#92. 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
#93. What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we're all dead.
Kate Atkinson
#94. She no longer recognized herself, she thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.
Kate Atkinson
#95. Long lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will but they won't.' -Sylvie
Kate Atkinson
#96. Shop-bought cakes are a sign of sluttish housewifery.
Kate Atkinson
#97. 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.
Kate Atkinson
#98. Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.
Kate Atkinson
#99. Pam wasn't what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had given up trying to get rid of her.
Kate Atkinson
#100. Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'
Kate Atkinson
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