632143
Atonement
- “...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a
glance.”
- “Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in
time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love
her, marry her and live without shame.”
- “I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you
completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee”
- “The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of
sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a
general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good
might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be
in love, and it thrilled him.”
- “Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he
recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy,
sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a
strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed
to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material
clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a
carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole
the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not
blemishes. Adornments.”
- “Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen.
She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the
one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence
or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”
- "They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but
obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their
limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then,
for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were
stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the
gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that
dropped away.”
- “How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.”
- “Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was
going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with
gratitude, or profound and particular regret.”
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