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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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Everything
Speaking
Must
Generally
Believe
Lies
Never
Lying
Half
Persons
Best
Person
Truths

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

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The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
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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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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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
Kate Atkinson
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They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
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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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
Kate Atkinson
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The past is what you take with you.
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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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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Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
Kate Atkinson
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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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She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
Kate Atkinson
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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
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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.
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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Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
Kate Atkinson
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The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
Kate Atkinson
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I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
Kate Atkinson