Quotes from book
Atonement

Atonement

Ian McEwanOriginal title 贖罪 (Japanese, 2001)

Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan concerning the understanding of and responding to the need for personal atonement. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl's half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.

“Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“… beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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 book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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 book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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 book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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 book Atonement

Source: Atonement

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

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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 book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“She lay in the dark and knew everything.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

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

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“… falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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 book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

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

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

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