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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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Door
Keys
Doors
Full
Past
Light
Cupboard
Find
Cupboards
Opens

More quotes by 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.
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No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.
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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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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.'
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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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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
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I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
Kate Atkinson
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Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
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You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
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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.
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The past is what you take with you.
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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