Top 200 Kate Atkinson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Kate Atkinson

203. “It just went to show, you never knew what you were going to feel until you felt it.”

— Kate Atkinson

204. “They have no sense of humour whatsoever – even Bunty has a sense of humour compared with our hosts. They have united Prussian gloom and Presbyterian dourness in an awesome combination.”

— Kate Atkinson

205. “Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different.”

— Kate Atkinson

206. “Moments left, Teddy thought. 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.”

— Kate Atkinson

207. “Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times.”

— Kate Atkinson

208. “Courtney was astonishingly reckless. A kid without reck was a dangerous thing. Other children in the play park yelled and screamed and laughed but Courtney was merely determined to test everything, including herself, to the limits, like a dogged little crash-test dummy.”

— Kate Atkinson

209. “Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I’m totally insane.”

— Kate Atkinson

210. “He has been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.”

— Kate Atkinson

211. “It was like dealing with Rasputin, not a middle-aged woman from Wolverhampton.”

— Kate Atkinson

212. “Teddy wandered amongst the graves. Most of the people in them had died long before his time. Ursula was picking up conkers from the stand of magnificent horse chestnuts at the far end of the churchyard. They were enormous trees and Teddy wondered if their roots had intertwined with the bones of the dead, imagined them curling a path through ribcages and braceleting ankles and fettering wrists. When.”

— Kate Atkinson

213. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula’s ear, “how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.”

— Kate Atkinson

214. “The last place he intended to end up in was the place he had started from, the place where his entire family lay restlessly in the earth.”

— Kate Atkinson

215. “Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.”

— Kate Atkinson

216. “Ursula found it very odd to think that up above them there were German bombers being flown by men who, essentially, were just like Teddy. They weren’t evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men. Although she would make an exception for Hitler.”

— Kate Atkinson

217. “Love. Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.”

— Kate Atkinson

218. “She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl was a little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl wasn’t it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.”

— Kate Atkinson

219. “Louise remembered that odd fluttery feeling of having a freewheeling baby inside you, independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic.”

— Kate Atkinson

220. “Must you always see the dark side of everything?’ Julia said. ‘Someone has to,’ Jackson said. ‘Yes, but does it have to be you?’ Apparently, yes. It did.”

— Kate Atkinson

221. “Our own homegrown evil, I’m sorry to say. And instead of rooting them out, the plan is to let them flourish – but within a walled garden from which they cannot escape and spread their evil seed.” A girl could die of old age following a metaphor like this, Juliet thought. “Very nicely put, sir,” she said.”

— Kate Atkinson

222. “Marlee was fourteen. A dangerous age, although, let’s face it, Jackson thought, every age was a dangerous age for a woman.”

— Kate Atkinson

223. “Really, every time a person said good-bye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much so.”

— Kate Atkinson

224. “But melancholy, that was his own true humor. A miserable bastard, in other words.”

— Kate Atkinson

225. “One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn’t like about Julia was her independence.”

— Kate Atkinson

226. “Some people were complete in themselves, as if born from the earth or the ocean, like some of the gods. Which was not a compliment. The gods were ruthlessly indifferent to humanity.”

— Kate Atkinson

227. “And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!”

— Kate Atkinson

228. “All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set.”

— Kate Atkinson

229. “Untouched by morning and untouched by noon, sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, rafter of satin and roof of stone.’ Emily Dickinson.”

— Kate Atkinson

230. “More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere.”

— Kate Atkinson

231. “People have the wrong idea about fairy tales, they think they’re about being rescued by handsome princes, whereas really they’re like Girl Guide handbooks.”

— Kate Atkinson

232. “He brought her a cup of tea, the first and last resource of an English husband.”

— Kate Atkinson

233. “The library had not been a career choice. After all, who would choose to be a librarian?”

— Kate Atkinson

234. “No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.”

— Kate Atkinson

235. “Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn’t really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs.”

— Kate Atkinson

236. “His body was exhausted, but his brain had apparently discovered a secret amphetamine factory and was popping pills at will. The picture on the wall opposite his bed was.”

— Kate Atkinson

237. “Maurice had disappeared after breakfast. He was a nine-year-old boy and free to go where he pleased with whomsoever he pleased, although he tended to keep to the exclusive company of other nine-year-old boys. Sylvie had no idea what they did but at the end of the day he would return, filthy from head to toe and with some unappetizing trophy, a jar of frogs or worms, a dead bird, the bleached skull of some small creature.”

— Kate Atkinson

238. “Well, we all get on,’ Sylvie said, ‘one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there.’ It.”

— Kate Atkinson

239. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked when Jackson took his own phone out of his pocket. Another chippy woman, Jackson thought with a sigh. Chippy women wherever he went. Chippy mothers who begat chippy daughters and so the circle of chippiness was unbroken.”

— Kate Atkinson

240. “The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears.”

— Kate Atkinson

241. “We could buy a sewing machine and share it,” Charlene said. “We could buy cloth and spools of thread and paper patterns and spend pleasant winter evenings dressmaking together. Perhaps by the soft light from beautiful glass oil lamps. We could sit in a pool of golden light from the beautiful glass oil lamps and our silver needles would glimmer and flash as we bowed our heads to the simple yet honest work.” But.”

— Kate Atkinson

242. “She would be happy – but not excessively so...”

— Kate Atkinson

243. “A garden, as far as Teddy could see, was nature tamed and constrained by artifice.”

— Kate Atkinson

244. “Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.”

— Kate Atkinson

245. “Sometimes he had the feeling that he existed only on the fringes of other people’s lives, not at the heart of his own.”

— Kate Atkinson

246. “You don’t see the point of English literature?’ ‘I don’t see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?”

— Kate Atkinson

247. “Gossip,” Mr. Pollock called it dismissively, but Gwendolen thought that was the word men gave to women’s conversation. Men talked in order to convey information or to ruminate on cricket scores and campaign statistics. Women, on the other hand, talked in an effort to understand the foibles of human behaviour. If men were to “gossip,” the world might be a better place. There would certainly be fewer wars.”

— Kate Atkinson