Atonement

by Ian McEwan

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing.

Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel.

😐

Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.

She vaguely knew that divorce was an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it no thought. It was a mundane unraveling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder.

Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter’s dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps …

dramatic as hell 😭

She liked his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of orange and green, made even more granular in sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall.

ohhh nothing like james mcavoy my impossibly blue eyed short king.. joe wright thank you for your changes and the robbie you gave us i am forever in your debt

Drowning herself would be his punishment.

He put his hand flat upon the surface, as though to quell it.

pride and prejudice hand flex WISHES it was this scene . just barely touching the surface of the water she was in as it's almost like touching her... kill me

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

ian mcewan your mind.... meta isms

Whatever happened in the future, however superficially strange or shocking, would also have an unsurprising, familiar quality, inviting her to say, but only to herself, Oh yes, of course. That. I should have known.

Not blemishes. Adornments.

He alone would know, and Emily of course. But only he would be thinking of them. And Cecilia would not speak to him or look at him. Even that would be better than lying here groaning. No, it wouldn’t. It would be worse, but he still wanted it. He had to have it. He wanted it to be worse.