Quotes from book

Atonement

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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”

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

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

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

“She lay in the dark and knew everything.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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