Top 200 Kate Atkinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Everything changes and nothing remains still. PLATO, Cratylus.”

— Kate Atkinson

52. “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win is for enough good women to do nothing.”

— Kate Atkinson

53. “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

54. “What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened – how did you live life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a strength and courage that most people didn’t have.”

— Kate Atkinson

55. “Writing felt like something she knew, although she only knew it from the other side – reading – and it took her a while to realize that writing and reading were completely different activities – polar opposites, in fact. And just because she could do joined-up handwriting, she discovered, didn’t mean that she could write books. But she persevered, perhaps for the first time in her life.”

— Kate Atkinson

56. “He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer.”

— Kate Atkinson

57. “When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape.”

— Kate Atkinson

58. “There was a strangeness in the shimmering air, a sense of imminence that made Ursula’s chest feel full, as if her heart was growing. It was a kind of high holiness – she could think of no other way of describing it. Perhaps it was the future, she thought, coming nearer all the time.”

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

61. “It was just as well the baby was strapped into his high chair, because every so often he would suddenly fling out his arms and legs and try to launch himself into the air like a suicidal starfish.”

— Kate Atkinson

62. “Don’t you wonder sometimes,′ Ursula said. ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.”

— Kate Atkinson

63. “The plot thickens,” he said, and wished he hadn’t said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. “I think we have a suspect.” That didn’t sound much better. “My house has just exploded, by the way.” At least that was novel.”

— Kate Atkinson

64. “How quickly life could dissolve into its more ugly elements.”

— Kate Atkinson

65. “When I’m writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can’t read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.”

— Kate Atkinson

66. “And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.”

— Kate Atkinson

67. “There’s too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there’s no room for the living.”

— Kate Atkinson

68. “The gods were on the point of giving up when Brahma said, ‘I know where we will hide man’s divinity, we will hide it inside him. he will search the whole world but never look inside and find what is already within.”

— Kate Atkinson

69. “She was wearing an aggressive three-piece outfit that was probably very expensive but had the kind of pattern you would get if you cut up the flags of several obscure countries and then gave them to a blind pigeon to stick back together again.”

— Kate Atkinson

70. “She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty.”

— Kate Atkinson

71. “My father was an autodidact. It wasn’t a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education – he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn’t allowed to go.”

— Kate Atkinson

72. “The past is what you take with you.”

— Kate Atkinson

73. “The purpose of Art,” his mother, Sylvie, said – instructed even – “is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.”

— Kate Atkinson

74. “It’s been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.”

— Kate Atkinson

75. “She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.”

— Kate Atkinson

76. “Feminism is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isnt it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldnt it?”

— Kate Atkinson

77. “A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a s fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood.”

— Kate Atkinson

78. “Dear God. When did language and meaning divorce each other and decide to go their separate ways?”

— Kate Atkinson

79. “Parenting is like writing, most people just make it up as they go along.”

— Kate Atkinson

80. “In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.”

— Kate Atkinson

81. “As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.”

— Kate Atkinson

82. “Juliet and Hartley had long ago abandoned manners with each other. It was refreshing to behave without respect towards someone.”

— Kate Atkinson

83. “The cats are murdering sleep, the wall rumbling with their engine purrs -prut prut prut as they snore their way to oblivion.”

— Kate Atkinson

84. “Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.”

— Kate Atkinson

85. “Running wasn’t pointless, of course. Sometimes you did it to try to outrun your thoughts, sometimes you did it to chase them and bring them down. Sometimes you did it so that you didn’t think at all.”

— Kate Atkinson

86. “But then, what constituted real? Wasn’t everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?”

— Kate Atkinson

87. “She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.”

— Kate Atkinson

88. “The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.”

— Kate Atkinson

89. “I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,’ Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was.”

— Kate Atkinson

90. “It was impossible to instruct on the subject of beauty, of course. It simply was. You were either moved by it or you weren’t.”

— Kate Atkinson

91. “How calm the house was. How deceptive that could be. One could lose everything in the blink of an eye, the slip of a foot. “One must avoid dark thoughts at all costs,” she said to Ursula.”

— Kate Atkinson

92. “The aircraft found the ground before Teddy did and he watched as it exploded in a glittery starburst of light. He would live, he realized. There would be an afterward after all. He gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him.”

— Kate Atkinson

93. “Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”

— Kate Atkinson

94. “Dr. Kellet said, “it’s a snake with its tail in its mouth.” He nodded approvingly and said to Sylvie, “It’s a symbol representing the circularity of the universe. Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.”

— Kate Atkinson

95. “There were doorways between this world and the next, she said, but only certain people could pass through them.”

— Kate Atkinson

96. “Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.”

— Kate Atkinson

97. “She had one of those husky voices that sounded as if she were permanently coming down with a cold. Men seemed to find that sexy in a woman, which Jackson thought was odd because it made women sound less like women and more like men. Maybe it was a gay thing.”

— Kate Atkinson

98. “Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving. “ ‘Sacrifice,’ ” he remembered.”

— Kate Atkinson

99. “This was love. It didn’t come free, you paid in pain. Your own. But then nobody ever said love was easy. Well, they did, but they were idiots.”

— Kate Atkinson

100. “Being flippant was harder work than being earnest.”

— Kate Atkinson