Kate Atkinson famous quotes

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

#Silence #Stories #Ends

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

#Mother #Sleep #Motherhood

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Past #Sometimes #Harder

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?
-- Kate Atkinson

#What If #Chance #Wonderful

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

#Waiting #Realizing #Feels

Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.
-- Kate Atkinson

#People #Events #Retrospect

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

#Thieves #Way #Away From You

(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
-- Kate Atkinson

#Brain #Half #Existential

Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Different #Hardest

It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Life #Impossible #Ends

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

#Past #Boards #Rubies

She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Dog #Believe #Said

You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Lying #Believe #Half

Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
-- Kate Atkinson

No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Thinking #Trying #Should

Why is everything an 'adventure' with you?" Sylvie said irritably to Izzie." "Because life is an adventure, of course." "I would say it was more of an endurance race," Sylvie said. "Or an obstacle course.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Adventure #Race #Endurance

Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Gratitude #Mistake #Sometimes

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

#Baby #Politician #Born

Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education…
-- Kate Atkinson

#Reading #Novel

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

#Loneliness #Solitude #Conundrums

What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened - how did you live life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a strength and courage that most people didn't have.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Live Life #Hands #People

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
-- Kate Atkinson

#World #Belief #Ends

I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Thinking #Mad

It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Yesterday #Long

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

#Pain #Memories #Alive

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

#Girl #Vocabulary #Emotion

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

#Normal #Persons

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

#Sleep #Cat #Thinking

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

#Strong #Heart #Pieces

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

#Lying #Reality #Ideas

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

#Writing #People #Narrative

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Self #Cells #Blood

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

#Real #Stories #World

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

#Secret #Grew Up #Amelia

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

#World #My Sister #Ends

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

#Men #Purpose #Earth

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

#Mother #Doubt #Guilty

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

#Beautiful #Morning #Cutting

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

#Eye #Ears #Way

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

#Rain #Profound #Grace

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

#Children #Character #Thinking

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.
-- Kate Atkinson

#Law #Path #Abiding