373 Quotes by Kate Atkinson

Bridget wouldn’t let Trixie come to Mrs. Dodds’s house, she said she would never hear the end of it. “She doesn’t believe in dogs,” Bridget said. “Dogs are hardly an article of faith,” Sylvie said.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn’t a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education – he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn’t allowed to go.

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-.

I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,’ Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was.

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’ and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

She... wanted no one – apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of ’unattainable.

He loved Viola as only a parent can love a child, but it was hard work.

Mr. Carver hadn’t been such a bad sort really. He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally.