373 Quotes by Kate Atkinson

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.

I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him? Ursula wondered. It seemed to her that in the search for arguments against marriage the existence of Maurice presented the very best one of all.

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

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.

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Life’s random,” he said. “The best you can do is pick up the pieces.

If you don’t have a unique voice, then you’re not really a writer.