Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson, MBEis an award-winning English writer. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 and, under its new name the Costa Book Awards, in 2013 and 2015 in the Novels category...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
live-life hands people
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.
rocks self cells
Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.
secret made grew
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.
world my-sister drawers
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.
men earth purpose
Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
sleep cat animal
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 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard.
writing people different
Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'
lying reality should-have
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.
strong heart pieces
They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
normal persons happenings
Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
girl vocabulary emotion
Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.
thinking mad
I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
world belief ends
In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
real stories world
Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.