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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Hated
Loneliness
Solitude
Solve
Begin
Couldn
Conundrum
Even
Craved
Conundrums

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
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I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.
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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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The past is what you take with you.
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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.
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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
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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.'
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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.
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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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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.
Kate Atkinson
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Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
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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Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.
Kate Atkinson
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I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
Kate Atkinson
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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?
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.
Kate Atkinson