Ian McEwan - Atonement (2001)

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Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

Ian McEwan
It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

Ian McEwan
The world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.

Ian McEwan
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

Ian McEwan
It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.

Ian McEwan
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.

Ian McEwan
Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.

Ian McEwan
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.

Ian McEwan
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

Ian McEwan
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

Ian McEwan
And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.

Ian McEwan
It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning,

Ian McEwan
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

Ian McEwan
It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

Ian McEwan
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.

Ian McEwan
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

Ian McEwan
However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

Ian McEwan
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

Ian McEwan
I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee

Ian McEwan
Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.

Ian McEwan
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

Ian McEwan
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.

Ian McEwan
No one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.

Ian McEwan
Falling in love could be achieved in a single word — a glance.

Ian McEwan
And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?

Ian McEwan
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

Ian McEwan
Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.

Ian McEwan
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

Ian McEwan
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

Ian McEwan
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

Ian McEwan