Quote

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.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Way
Outwit
Time
Snatch
Life
Stole
Thief
Thieves
Away
Back
Right

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
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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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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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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
Kate Atkinson
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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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I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
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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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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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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.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson