Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
("Atonement")
More Quotes from Ian McEwan:
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.Ian McEwan
Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution
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This, as they used to say, was the side on which her bread was buttered.
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How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
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That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
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From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
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Based on Topics: World QuotesBased on Keywords: unbearably
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