Quote

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

Kate Atkinson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Happen
Waiting
Happens
Feel
Feels
Dreadful
Something
Realize
Already
Realizing

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

Image
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.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
Kate Atkinson
Image
(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
Kate Atkinson
Image
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?
Kate Atkinson
Image
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.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
Kate Atkinson
Image
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
Image
You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.
Kate Atkinson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
Image
I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
Kate Atkinson
Image
If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
Kate Atkinson
Image
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
Image
Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
Kate Atkinson
Image
I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
Image
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.
Kate Atkinson