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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.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Mother
Didn
Feel
Feels
Even
Guilty
Strength
Terrible
Doubt

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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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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.
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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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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
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You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.
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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.
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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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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
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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.
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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
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You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
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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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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.
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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.
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I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
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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.
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