Quote

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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Read
Actresses
Three
Tales
Reality
Door
Around
Doors
Wanted
Started
Conform
Everything
Imagination
Actress
Children
Child
Opened
Reading
Fairy

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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.
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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.
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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
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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.
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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.
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She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
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The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
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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.
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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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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The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
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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.
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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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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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She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
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