Top 200 Kate Atkinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Juliet sighed and wondered if one day she would think herself to death. Was that possible? And would it be painful?”

— Kate Atkinson

152. “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.”

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

154. “She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down – something that was chasing her down.”

— Kate Atkinson

155. “The Knights’ Code,” which he had learned by heart from Scouting for Boys, a book he frequently turned to in times of uncertainty, even now in his self-exile from the movement, demanded that “Chivalry requireth that youth should be trained to perform the most laborious and humble offices with cheerfulness and grace.” He supposed entertaining Izzie was one of those occasions. It was certainly laborious.”

— Kate Atkinson

156. “Viola felt as if she spent her life wading through a sea of ignorance, shallow but without a shore in sight.”

— Kate Atkinson

157. “There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky.”

— Kate Atkinson

158. “Civilizations rose and fell and in the end everything was dust and sand. Nothing beside remained. Hotels, maybe.”

— Kate Atkinson

159. “Viola was a good reader, a bookworm – a phrase she hated. “How can a worm be a nice thing to be?” Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at herself for having reached such a pass. “Without worms we wouldn’t be able to grow food and everyone would starve,” Nancy said reasonably.”

— Kate Atkinson

160. “He was officially a lunatic, she decided. Strangely, that didn’t make him less attractive.”

— Kate Atkinson

161. “Her mother was still more of a presence than an absence in her life. Juliet supposed that one day in the future it would be the other way round, but she doubted that would be an improvement.”

— Kate Atkinson

162. “Sylvie’s children really only came into focus for her when in isolation. Together, they were an unwieldy flock, singly they had character.”

— Kate Atkinson

163. “She didnt see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more.”

— Kate Atkinson

164. “Why make it easy when you could make it as difficult for yourself as possible? She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything.”

— Kate Atkinson

165. “I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.”

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

167. “Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?”

— Kate Atkinson

168. “Bridget wouldn’t let Trixie come to Mrs. Dodds’s house, she said she would never hear the end of it. “She doesn’t believe in dogs,” Bridget said. “Dogs are hardly an article of faith,” Sylvie said.”

— Kate Atkinson

169. “No woman was ever truly safe. It didn’t matter if you were as tough as Sigourney Weaver in Alien Resurrection or Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 because wherever you went there were men.”

— Kate Atkinson

170. “He noticed that Ursula’s ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.”

— Kate Atkinson

171. “I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don’t you think?”

— Kate Atkinson

172. “He wanted to be deafened by the thunder of her engines, he needed to be drained of every thought by the cold, the noise, the equal amounts of boredom and adrenalin. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now he realized, he had been erased by it.”

— Kate Atkinson

173. “She didn’t feel she had the fortitude for all those Tudors, they were so relentlessly busy – all that bedding and beheading.”

— Kate Atkinson

174. “Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. “Gone,” she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. “Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.”

— Kate Atkinson

175. “Pamela produced placid babies. “They don’t tend to turn feral until they’re two,” she said.”

— Kate Atkinson

176. “It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.”

— Kate Atkinson

177. “She felt as if she had been on the outside of happiness her whole life.”

— Kate Atkinson

178. “She remembered holding Pamela’s babies – remembered Teddy and Jimmy, too – how overwhelming the feelings of love and terror, the desperate desire to protect. How much stronger would those feelings be if it were her own child? Perhaps too strong to bear. Over.”

— Kate Atkinson

179. “He could hardly beat them up, they were still – technically – children and he preferred to restrict his acts of violence to people old enough to fight for their country.”

— Kate Atkinson

180. “The “eat” part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.”

— Kate Atkinson

181. “Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.”

— Kate Atkinson

182. “He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother’s arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.”

— Kate Atkinson

183. “People always said they wanted the truth, but really they were perfectly content with a facsimile.”

— Kate Atkinson

184. “Sometimes Teddy wondered if everyone had done well out of the war except for those who had fought in it.”

— Kate Atkinson

185. “The war had been a tide that had receded and now here it was lapping around her ankles again.”

— Kate Atkinson

186. “I think I would rather just live my life,” Teddy said, “not make an artifice of it.”

— Kate Atkinson

187. “He caught the look on her face, a mixture of distaste and confusion which eventually resolved into something more cryptic. Women usually needed to be acquainted with him a little longer before he saw that expression on their faces.”

— Kate Atkinson

188. “They’re definitely going to declare war tomorrow. In the morning. It’s probably timed so that the nation can get down on its collective knees in church and pray for deliverance.’ ‘Oh, yes, war is always so Christian, isn’t it?”

— Kate Atkinson

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

— Kate Atkinson

190. “Wronged wives were a law unto themselves.”

— Kate Atkinson

191. “Life is too precious to be unhappy.’ Ursula wondered how many people across London were saying the same thing that night. Perhaps in less salubrious surroundings. And there would be others, of course, who would be saying the same words to cleave to what they already had, not to discard it on a whim. Suddenly.”

— Kate Atkinson

192. “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

193. “Now we must feast!’ Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion – it seemed like cannibalism, not to mention utterly disgusting.”

— Kate Atkinson

194. “Boys took a long time to become men but daughters were women from the kickoff.”

— Kate Atkinson

195. “That was the one thing June had been terrified of having – a standard life, an ordinary life, a life like her parents’ – living in a pink sandstone semi-detached villa in the suburbs with a neat garden and an en-suite master bedroom with fitted wardrobes.”

— Kate Atkinson

196. “Bridget wiped her tears vigorously on her apron and said, “Must get on with the tea.”

— Kate Atkinson

197. “The Germans were victims of the Nazis too, but one can’t say that too loudly, of course.”

— Kate Atkinson

198. “Right up until the end, Victor’s mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there – a five-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver – would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn’t lay your hands on.”

— Kate Atkinson

199. “Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.”

— Kate Atkinson

200. “We’re all Bolsheviks now,” Izzie said blithely. “And at my table!” Hugh said and laughed.”

— Kate Atkinson