Kate Atkinson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Kate Atkinson on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself. SYLVIE BERESFORD TODD

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

She ... wanted no one - apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of 'unattainable.

Home ... wasn't Egerton Gardens, wasn't even Fox Corner. Home was an idea, and like Arcadia it was lost in the past.

Sometimes it takes just one good man

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.

People who live on their own do tend to witter. We live without restraint, verbal at any rate.' Nigel

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

She prayed now, with desperate conviction but no faith, and she suspected it made no difference either way. When

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

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

This was beauty too. Was there anything in nature that wasn't?

Normally she restricts herself to a very narrow spectrum of emotions (irritable, irritated, irritating).

Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight.

A woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head.

The "eat" part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.

Time isn't circular," she said to Dr. Kellet. "It's like a ... palimpsest.

The last thing she wanted was people looking for her. No, that wasn't true
the last thing she wanted was people finding her.

Sylvie's children really only came into focus for her when in isolation. Together, they were an unwieldy flock, singly they had character.

Daddy said he would rather we were alive and cowards than dead and heroes.

strangers? Millie's swan song on the stage, the last

Being kind modified the extraordinary, alarming otherness of him, which was threefold - large, male and American.

[She] went around with a beatific smile on her face that could be very irritating if you yourself weren't feeling beatific.

Sometimes Teddy wondered if everyone had done well out of the war except for those who had fought in it.

Art is anything created by one person and enjoyed by another.

-by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I've discovered so far).

Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.

a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. Ursula

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

Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element.

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

Much good may "honour" do them when they're dead

There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky.

You said five little words to someone
How can I help you?
and it was as if you'd mortgaged your soul out to them.

The only time you were safe was when you were dead.

The hospital. He was the youthful partner of an older doctor

Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving.

So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country - The Rest Of My Life.

Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded.

We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we?" Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, "But remember, without the cog there is no machine.

It was one of those questions you couldn't ask in case he were to tell the truth.

You did not need a God (Sylvie was an unconfessed atheist) to believe in sin. She

("An eye for an eye," Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)

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.

It was war itself that was evil, not men.

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

If there was one thing she found more tedious than thinking about politics it was talking about politics.

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

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

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

Long lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will but they won't.' -Sylvie

sequiturs. 'That's got nothing to do with it,' Teddy

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

There is a world outside these walls.

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

She ... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman ...

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

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.

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

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was.

She was flawed, no longer intact. On the other hand, she felt as if she had been scourged clean. The past no longer weighed so heavily on the present.

Trying to restore some kind of natural balance of humors in the world.

It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did.

Was there a poet who hadn't written about skylarks?

And when all else is gone, Art remains.

'Feminism' is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isn't it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldn't it?

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

... the doors of perception are hanging crazily off their hinges these days.

There's too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there's no room for the living.

Harold?' 'Poor man, I suppose

Disengaging from the rat race Jackson

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

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

Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire.

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

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.

He had seemed fierce and noble but in the end he was as disappointing as everyone else.

He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep - no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.

let's face it, no one warned you about anything.

The past is what you take with you.

Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?

('The mistake,' Sylvie said, 'is thinking that love equates with happiness.')

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

Bridget wiped her tears vigorously on her apron and said, Must get on with the tea.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.

Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed.

What on earth was she doing with her life? Could she just get up and leave?

I'm a shadow of my former self, she announces. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she's a shadow of a shadow.

Anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense

What's life worth if you can't have some fun?

Ursula found herself dwelling on Hugh's death, his absence more than his death.

I heard someone say once that hindsight was a wonderful thing, that without it there would be no history.

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.

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.

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

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

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.