Home > Work > Atonement

Atonement QUOTES

Atonement QUOTES

1 " The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

2 " 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 , Atonement

3 " 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 , Atonement

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

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

5 " 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 , Atonement

6 " We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

7 " 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 , Atonement

8 " 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 , Atonement

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

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

10 " At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

11 " The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

12 " She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

13 " Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

14 " These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

15 " She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

16 " Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

17 " When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

18 " They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

19 " Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement

20 " He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father. "

― Ian McEwan , Atonement