Quotes from Kate Atkinson

When I started 'Case Histories,' the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called 'Embarkation.' It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but it mushroomed into an entire book.

I was an only child and grew up in York where my parents ran a surgical supplies shop. When I say I wish I had brothers and sisters, friends say it's not what it's cracked up to be, but I think it must be good to have someone who knew you from the beginning.

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win is for enough good women to do nothing.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.

but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.

You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

Scars heal," Sylvie said. "Even the worst ones.

The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.

One's own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

The man who was speaking had a degree in jargon and a doctorate in nonsense.

The future was coming nearer, one relentless goose step after the next. Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. ("The clowns are the dangerous ones," Perry said.)

I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?

I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.

Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?