She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.
("Atonement")
More Quotes from Ian McEwan:
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.Ian McEwan
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
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
Ian McEwan
It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning,
Ian McEwan
I now bear a kind of stigmata. I am in the computer as having been denied entry to the United States and that is really bad news. They can put things into that computer, but they never take them out.
Ian Mcewan
She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply - notions as self evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with courage to confront him.
Ian McEwan
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
Based on Keywords: piquancyEverywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Kate OBrien
My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.
Cory Doctorow
In one year I travelled 450,000 miles by air.
Jackie Stewart