Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Kate Atkinson - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic, no matter how lapsed they are.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Feminism is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isnt it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldnt it?

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.

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).

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.

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.

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.