Top 200 Kate Atkinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There were doorways between this world and the next, she said, but only certain people could pass through them.”

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

103. “Juliet felt slighted yet relieved. It was curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord. She felt an odd pang at the sight of him. She had been fond of him. She had been his girl. Reader, I didn’t marry him, she thought.”

— Kate Atkinson

104. “Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart.”

— Kate Atkinson

105. “The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.”

— Kate Atkinson

106. “She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.”

— Kate Atkinson

107. “Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.”

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

109. “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

110. “One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.”

— Kate Atkinson

111. “She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.”

— Kate Atkinson

112. “The blame generally has to fall somewhere, Miss Armstrong. Women and the Jews tend to be first in line, unfortunately.”

— Kate Atkinson

113. “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.”

— Kate Atkinson

114. “If you don’t have a unique voice, then you’re not really a writer.”

— Kate Atkinson

115. “How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him? Ursula wondered. It seemed to her that in the search for arguments against marriage the existence of Maurice presented the very best one of all.”

— Kate Atkinson

116. “The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense.”

— Kate Atkinson

117. “Sister Michael turned and looked at him, and, despite her plump, jolly face, she had nuns’ eyes, and nuns’ eyes, Jackson knew, could see right inside your head, so he nodded respectfully at the statue. Sanguis Christi, inebria me.”

— Kate Atkinson

118. “Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.”

— Kate Atkinson

119. “By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.”

— Kate Atkinson

120. “He loved Viola as only a parent can love a child, but it was hard work.”

— Kate Atkinson

121. “Why did people understand how precious each day was only once the doors to the grave had opened and they had looked inside? What was the point of that?”

— Kate Atkinson

122. “Afterwards – because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy – he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.”

— Kate Atkinson

123. “How wonderfully, joyously, untrammeled he had been then in his happiness. She thought it was fixed for ever, she didn’t realize that childhood happiness dissolves away. If she had realized that Archie wasn’t going to be that sunny innocent child for ever she would have laid up every moment as treasure.”

— Kate Atkinson

124. “Sylvia loved secrets and even if she didn’t have any secrets she made sure that you thought she did. Amelia had no secrets, Amelia knew nothing. When she grew up she planned to know everything and to keep it all a secret.”

— Kate Atkinson

125. “If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn’t mind being their mother.”

— Kate Atkinson

126. “Mr. Carver hadn’t been such a bad sort really. He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.”

— Kate Atkinson

127. “Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?”

— Kate Atkinson

128. “I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere – 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.”

— Kate Atkinson

129. “The only time you were safe was when you were dead.”

— Kate Atkinson

130. “If he hadn’t been the father of her children, Viola might have admired Dominic for the way he was so easily able to absolve himself of all obligation simply by asserting his right to self-fulfilment.”

— Kate Atkinson

131. “That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers.”

— Kate Atkinson

132. “She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.”

— Kate Atkinson

133. “Ursula tried to remember what her own last words to her father had been. A nonchalant ‘See you later,’ she concluded. The final irony. ‘We never know when it will be the last time,’ she said...”

— Kate Atkinson

134. “Why was it that the females of the species were always the ones left to tidy up, she wondered? I expect Jesus came out of the tomb... and said to his mother, “Can you tidy it up a bit back there?”

— Kate Atkinson

135. “Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally.”

— Kate Atkinson

136. “Amelia looked at the eggs-like sickly, jaundiced eyes-and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light-.”

— Kate Atkinson

137. “So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.”

— Kate Atkinson

138. “Scars heal,” Sylvie said. “Even the worst ones.”

— Kate Atkinson

139. “Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.”

— Kate Atkinson

140. “There were many things Viola could have said at this point. She had thought of all of them while gazing at the forest, the sacred river, the birds, ‘I’m sorry’ being foremost, but instead she told him about the dream. ‘And then you turned to me and you were smiling and you said, “We did it, Mum! Everyone got on the train.”’ ‘I don’t think it was about the train.’ ‘No,’ Viola agreed. ‘It was how I felt when you spoke to me.’ ‘Which was?’ ‘Overwhelmed by love. For you.’ Oh, Viola. At last. Bertie.”

— Kate Atkinson

141. “Later, when she understood that it was the last time they would all be together, she wished she had paid more attention.”

— Kate Atkinson

142. “Not his real home, his real home, the one he never named any more, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution.”

— Kate Atkinson

143. “Now it would not be the geography of Empire that would make him, it would be the architecture of war.”

— Kate Atkinson

144. “After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink.”

— Kate Atkinson

145. “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.”

— Kate Atkinson

146. “She... wanted no one – apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of ’unattainable.”

— Kate Atkinson

147. “Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father’s brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image.”

— Kate Atkinson

148. “She was one of those girls who wasn’t entirely convinced that food was necessary for survival – anything more robust than a strawberry yoghurt made her anxious.”

— Kate Atkinson

149. “It was the war, Juliet thought, remembering the photograph of the flamingo’s creased wife, it has made refugees of us all.”

— Kate Atkinson

150. “Best always to praise rather than criticize.”

— Kate Atkinson