“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, quote from Case Histories
“It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“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.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“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, quote from Case Histories
“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, quote from Case Histories
“Olivia was her only beautiful child. Julia, with her dark curls and snub nose, was pretty but her character wasn't, Sylvia --- poor Sylvia, what could you say? And Amelia was somehow ...bland, but Olivia, Olivia was spun from light. It seemed impossible that she was Victor's child, although, unfortunately, there was no doubting the fact. Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. Everything was from duty, nothing from love. Duty killed you in the end.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“[T]he parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with cherries on top. And chocolate shavings and those little silver balls that cracked your fillings.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“The only time you were safe was when you were dead.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“It would be like a Hardy novel, before it all goes wrong.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“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, quote from Case Histories
“And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute governesses. Or — preferably — the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of place.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“Je suis désolé,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“She...wanted no one—apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of 'unattainable.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky’s outfit he actually made it seem strangely distinguished. Howell”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“continually amazed at just how many skills and crafts could go into making “a lovely home”—the patchwork quilts you could sew, the curtains you could ruffle, the cucumbers you could pickle, the rhubarb you could make into jam, the icing-sugar decorations you could create for your Christmas cake—which you were supposed to make in September at the latest (for heaven’s sake)—and at the same time remember to plant your indoor bulbs so they would also be ready for “the festive season,” and it just went on and on, every month a list of tasks that would have defeated Hercules and that was without the everyday preparation of meals,”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“If it hadn’t been for this chance hospital encounter, accidental in all senses, Victor might never have courted a girl. He already felt well on his way to middle age, and his social life was still limited to the chess club. Victor didn’t really feel the need for another person in his life, in fact he found the concept of “sharing” a life bizarre. He had mathematics, which filled up his time almost completely, so he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted with a wife. Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness, but also a multiplicity of physical drawbacks—blood, sex, children—which were unsettling and other.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“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, quote from Case Histories
“This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends — 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland — she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“The plot thickens,” he said, and wished he hadn’t said that because it sounded like something from a bad detective novel. “I think we have a suspect.” That didn’t sound much better. “My house has just exploded, by the way.” At least that was novel.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“And she could be depressed if she wanted to be, she could sit and watch Dogs with Jobs on the National Geographic Channel and eat her way through a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits if she felt like it because nobody cared about her. In fact, she could sit there all day, from Barney and Friends to Porn Babes Laid Bare, with hours of the Landscape Channel in between, and eat the contents of an entire biscuit factory until she was an obese, earthbound balloon whose dead and bloated body would have to be hydraulically lifted from the house by a fire crew because nobody cared.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories
“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, quote from Case Histories
Kate Atkinson
Born place: in York, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 1, 1951
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“I don't want to love like a woman or feel like a woman, Mr Davey; there's pain that way, and suffering, and misery that can last a lifetime. I didn't bargain for this; I don't want it.”
― Daphne du Maurier, quote from Jamaica Inn
“To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Tombs of Atuan
“Vendetta is the word, except it isn't strong enough.”
― Sister Souljah, quote from The Coldest Winter Ever
“And if I'm alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Manuscript Found in Accra
“Nay. I wanted only to be loved by those whom I love; to be looked upon and not found wanting.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from A Kingdom of Dreams
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