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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
Kate Atkinson
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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Learned
Become
More quotes by Kate Atkinson
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
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
(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
Kate Atkinson
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
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
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
Kate Atkinson
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
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
Kate Atkinson
The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
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
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
The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
Kate Atkinson
Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
Kate Atkinson
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.
Kate Atkinson
Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.
Kate Atkinson
I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
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
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
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
You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
Kate Atkinson