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 th...”

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

“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”

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

“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...”

“But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vul...”

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

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

“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 si...”

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

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