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The past is what you take with you.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Past
Take

More quotes by 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.
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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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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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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.
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I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
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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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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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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
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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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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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'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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(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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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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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