Kate Atkinson Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

Kate Atkinson
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

Kate Atkinson
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn't even begin to solve.

Kate Atkinson
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

Kate Atkinson
If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

Kate Atkinson
Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard.

Kate Atkinson
I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer.I would put my sisters.

Kate Atkinson
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
I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

Kate Atkinson
Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn't have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.

Kate Atkinson
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
I feel as if I'm waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.

Kate Atkinson
As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.

Kate Atkinson
If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.

Kate Atkinson
The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself - if anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn't necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (Come along now, don't make such a fuss).

Kate Atkinson
You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

Kate Atkinson
I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

Kate Atkinson
The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

Kate Atkinson
Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

Kate Atkinson
Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.

Kate Atkinson
Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.

Kate Atkinson
Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?

Kate Atkinson
The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

Kate Atkinson
He was born a politician. No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.

Kate Atkinson
Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

Kate Atkinson