Kate Atkinson Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

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

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.

She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.

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.

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.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

Do not equate nationalism with patriotism... Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.

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

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

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…

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

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

Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.

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

A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win is for enough good women to do nothing.

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” Klara said. “If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

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

The purpose of Art,” his mother, Sylvie, said—instructed even—“is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.

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

...but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.

We cannot turn away,” Miss Woolf told her, “we must get on with our job and we must bear witness.” What did that mean, Ursula wondered. “It means,” Miss Woolf said, “that we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.” “And if we are killed?” “Then others must remember us.

Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance.

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

Scars heal,” Sylvie said. “Even the worst ones.

The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.

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

One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense.

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.

In the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there." It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point.

I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.

I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?

Kittens were in continual abundance on the farm, there was a kind of kitten currency in the neighborhood, they were bartered for all kinds of emotional regret or fulfillment by parents - a doll lost, an exam passed.

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

She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.

All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination. And this one is Teddy's.

Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

The future was coming nearer, one relentless goose step after the next. Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (“The clowns are the dangerous ones,” Perry said.)

Time is construct, in relativity every thing flows, no past or present, only the now.

How quickly life could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

Just because something bad had happened to her doesn't mean it won't happen again.

Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.

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?

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

[…] but her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.

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.

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?

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.

She was born with the winter already in her bones.

It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.

Dear God. When did language and meaning divorce each other and decide to go their separate ways?

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.

Marriage is based on a more enduring kind of love.

Human nature favors the tribal. Tribalism engenders violence. It was ever thus and so it will ever be.

The blame generally has to fall somewhere, Miss Armstrong. Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately.

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.

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.

Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb...and said to his mother, "Can you tidy it up a bit back there?

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.

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?

Needs must, and so on.

Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted,

you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.

Get down,' Bunty says grimly. 'Mummy's thinking.' (Although what Mummy's actually doing is wondering what it would be like if her entire family was wiped out and she could start again.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

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.

A 'career woman,'" Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. "A spinster," she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. "Perhaps you will never marry," Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula's life was as good as over. "Would that be such a bad thing? 'The unmarried daughter,'" Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. "It was good enough for Jane Austen.

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.

Dr. Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelled of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, "So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?" (Oh, that's why I'm here, Ursula thought.)

He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother’s arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.

Fox Corner - that's what we should call the house. No one else has a house with that name and shouldn't that be the point?' 'Really?' Hugh said doubtfully. 'It's a little whimsical, isn't it? It sounds like a children's story. The House at Fox Corner.' 'A little whimsy never hurt anyone.' 'Strictly speaking, though,' Hugh said, 'can a house be a corner? Isn't it at one?' So this is marriage, Sylvie thought.

Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.

She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.