Atoning

Okay so it's not a clever title. Well, I am currently reading Atonement by Ian McEwan (wow, I've been at this book for aaaages) and I am trying to atone for the lack of posts lately!

We were having--- actually we still are having a tough time at home. We're moving!!! Been pretty busy with the repairs of the new home and packing all our stuff. *Sniff, Sniff* I feel really sad leaving our home. We've lived there for around 13 years. Hopefully we can all scramble and leave before September 18. And ugh, it's such a downer to spend September 19 unpacking and decorating our home. It's my birthday, I was planning to host a Crab Party! :(

Anyway, I thought I would just like to share my favorite quotes on Atonement, if you don't mind. I love this book. Everytime I read a passage that struck me, I hastily jot it down.
The book is wonderfully written, it is so erudite! The story itself makes me contemplate on the dynamics of family, the strength of imagination of strange and extreme thoughts; it makes me believe in love despite the distance and the struggles all lovers face. I am still bristling with Briony. I'm currently at the part where she sheds her childhood precociousness and has finally been shot down to reality and have grasped the gravity of her lies. But I still remember what she did when she was a child, and like Cecilia, I simply CANNOT forgive her.

So, onto the quotes, shall we?


The world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving for equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone's thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.


In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.


The strangeness of here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew and what power one could have over the other, and how easy t was to get everything wrong, completely wrong.


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.


The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.


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 inlove; and it thrilled him.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

There was no confusion in her mind: these too-vivid untrustworthy impressions, her self-doubt, the intrusive visual clarity and eerie differences that had wrapped themselves around the familiar were no more than continuations, variations of how she had been seeing and feeling all day.

But what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy?

Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people-- there really was nothing else.

That he worked late she did not doubt, but she knew that he did not sleep at his club, and he know that she knew this. But there was nothing to say. Or rather, there was too much. The resembled each other in their dread of conflict, and the regularity of his evening calls, however much she disbelieved them, was a comfort to them both. If this sham was conventional hypocrisy, she had to concede that it had its uses.

Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of details into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

As the distance opened up between them, they had understood how far they had run ahead of themselves... This moment had been imagined and desired for too long, and could not measure up.

One person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

I hope you enjoyed a few of the quotes as much as I did. I picked these because the passages struck a chord in me. It's like these thoughts were the things that I felt but I could never verbalize. Reading them is like finding something significant and whopping in triumph because you have finally found something actual for those abstract, intangible thoughts you can't put a finger to.