"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 (Case Histories: A Novel)

"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."
— Kate Atkinson

"The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories."
— Kate Atkinson (Human Croquet: A Novel)

"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."
— Kate Atkinson (One Good Turn)

"Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person."
— Kate Atkinson (When Will There Be Good News?: A Novel)

"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 (Case Histories: A Novel)

"I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am."
— Kate Atkinson (Human Croquet: A Novel)

"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?"
— Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel)

"In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense."
— Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel)

"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."
— Kate Atkinson (Emotionally Weird)

"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."
— Kate Atkinson (Emotionally Weird)

"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."
— Kate Atkinson (Emotionally Weird)

"If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother."
— Kate Atkinson (Case Histories: A Novel)

"She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty."
— Kate Atkinson (Case Histories: A Novel)

"A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body."
— Kate Atkinson (Emotionally Weird)

"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."
— Kate Atkinson (One Good Turn)

"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 (Case Histories: A Novel)

"Before the beginning is the void and the void belongs in neither time nor space and is therefore beyond our imagination.
Nothing will come of nothing unless it's the beginning of the world. This is how it begins, with the word and the word is life. The void is transformed by a gigantic firecracker allowing time to dawn and imagination to begin."
— Kate Atkinson (Human Croquet: A Novel)

"As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow."
— Kate Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel)