Kate Atkinson Quotes

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

The past is what you take with you.

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.

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.

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.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

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.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.

I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.

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?

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer .I would put my sisters.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

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.

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.