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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

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Perhaps
Tell
Place
Stories
Must
Machina
Real
Backdrop
World
Exes
Artificial

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

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I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.
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Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.
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I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
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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.
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Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
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She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
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I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
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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.
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Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.
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The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
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She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
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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.
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Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
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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.
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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.
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Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination - they don't conform to the reality that's around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress.
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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
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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 five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning.
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