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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Sometimes
Love
Sylvie
Gratitude
Mistake

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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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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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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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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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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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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
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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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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.
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Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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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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You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
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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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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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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'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.
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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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Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
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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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I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
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