Quote

The past is what you take with you.

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
Past
Take

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

Image
The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
Kate Atkinson
Image
He was born a politician. No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.
Kate Atkinson
Image
I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
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
You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
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
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
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
(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
Kate Atkinson
Image
Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
Kate Atkinson
Image
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
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
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
Image
Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning.
Kate Atkinson
Image
The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
Kate Atkinson
Image
Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.
Kate Atkinson