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
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.
children character thinking
I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.
rain profound grace
I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.