Atonement Quotes
"Love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed."
"Nothing came near it for satisfaction, all else was dreams and frustration."
"Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing."
"Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding."
"A taste for the miniature was one aspect of an orderly spirit."
"The imagination itself was a source of secrets."
"In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world."
"Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing."
"It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding."
"It's hardly an excuse, I know, but lately I seem to be awfully lightheaded around you."
"In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long."
"In the years to come he would often think back to this time, when he walked along the footpath that made a shortcut through a corner of the oak woods."
"But there was no mistake. The handwritten letter he had rested on the open copy of Gray's Anatomy, Splanchnology section, page 1546, the vagina."
"She hated the thought of appearing austere. Relaxed was how she wanted to feel, and, at the same time, self-contained."
"They would have run his wheelbarrow into the deep end if he had not gone across."
"Once your life gets going you'll find that stuff doesn't mean a thing."
"Only time, a prudish veil of hours, prevented her brother from seeing her as she had been."
"Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all."
"Literature and politics, science and religion did not bore him—they simply had no place in his world."
"His equanimity was bottomless, as was his lack of ambition, and he assumed that everyone else was much like him."
"The sweetness of the evening air moved through and around her, conjuring a world of good intentions and pleasant outcomes."
"The agreeable nullity of Leon’s life was a polished artifact, its ease deceptive, its limitations achieved by invisible hard work."
"It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave?"
"There was desperation in all she said, an emptiness at its core, or something excluded or unnamed that made her talk faster."
"The very complexity of her feelings confirmed her in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion."
"Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things."
"In matters of selfless love, nothing needed to be said."
"Truth was strange and deceptive, it had to be struggled for, against the flow of the everyday."
"To be the object of adult hatred was an initiation into a solemn new world."
"Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"
"The fairy stories were behind her, and in the space of a few hours she had witnessed mysteries."
"Her childhood had ended, she decided now as she came away from the swimming pool."
"But how had her mother materialized so quickly from Lola’s bedside?"
"She had been out of the world, and lacked the confidence to step back and reach for the larger thought."
"It was as if these terrifying authorities, these uniformed agents, had been lying in wait."
"She trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction."
"They turned on you, all of them, even my father. When they wrecked your life they wrecked mine."
"I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one, my reason for life."
"My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch."
"The military response was automatic, like the reflexes of a clam."
"By the time she returned from Liverpool, he was disembarking at Cherbourg and the dullest winter of his life lay before him."
"I’m not going to go away. I’ll wait for you. Come back."
"In fact, they had little heavy weaponry at all. It was a time of boredom and football matches against other units."
"It may have been the first touches of green along the French lanes and the haze of bluebells glimpsed through the woods that made him feel the need for reconciliation and fresh beginnings."
"If it’s not legally possible for Briony to go before a judge and tell him she’s had second thoughts, then she can at least go and tell our parents."
"But I’m waiting for you, my darling, to tell me your thoughts."
"He was so tired, he kept forgetting. And it was hot now. Some men were letting their greatcoats drop to the ground."
"He was the only man on earth and his purpose was clear. He was walking across the land until he came to the sea."
"Everyone in the cellar was waiting, everyone on the beach."
"Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached."
"No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts."
"The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed."
"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended."
"It was enough to be able to keep walking down the empty corridors behind the other girls."
"She would have liked to cry for him, and for his family in Millau who would be waiting to hear news from him. But she couldn’t feel a thing. She was empty."
"Every secret of the body was rendered up—bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve."
"I am returning the typescript under separate cover. That said, we found ourselves reading the whole with great interest."
"Though we cannot offer to publish any part of it, in this quarter there are others as well as myself who would take an interest in what you might write in the future."
"The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts."
"Who can doubt the value of this experimentation?"
"Your most sophisticated readers might be well up on the latest Bergsonian theories of consciousness, but I’m sure they retain a childlike desire to be told a story."
"Your work, your war work, is to cultivate your talent, and go in the direction it demands."
"Waking as a child on Christmas day was like this—the sleepy thrill, before remembering its source."
"She counted herself lucky to be on days, seven till eight with half hours for meals."
"She drifted upward from a soft pit of exhaustion, and in the several seconds of no-man’s-land, between sleep and full consciousness, she became aware of some excitement in store."
"The clarity of everything she saw or touched or heard was certainly not prompted by the fresh beginnings and abundance of early summer; it was an inflamed awareness of an approaching conclusion, of events converging on an end point."
"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."
"Which portion of my mind, of my memory, had I lost to a minuscule stroke while I was asleep? I would never know."
"Panic would be too strong a word. Claustrophobia was part of it, helpless confinement within a process of decay, and a sensation of shrinking."
"It helped me. It amused me. It sounded so childish, though I had a suspicion that some terrible sentiments were being expressed."
"The music was still playing as we turned into the drive of Tilney’s Hotel."
"I couldn’t help thinking of them as trespassers."
"There was no need to be nostalgic—it was always an ugly place."
"I stood at the window to admire the sunlight slanting over the golf course, and burnishing the bare trees on the distant hills."
"I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end."