Atonement

by Ian McEwan

her meek, evasive brother-in-law Cecil who had fled to the safety of All Souls College, Oxford.

Rien que ça

For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers.

one would think a writer would be a reader though

she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.

Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence.

nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child.

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?

The uniform, like all uniforms, eroded identity,

Ok boomer

St. Thomas’s Hospital. It took a clobbering in the Blitz—I wasn’t there, thank God—and the replacement buildings and the tower block are a national disgrace.

Sorry friends!

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.

No, it's still plain as day