Atonement by Ian McEwan

“It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in–but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.”
– Chapter 2, pg. 22

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? 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. One could drown in irrelevance.” – Chapter 3, pg. 34

“By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle and it was there.” – Chapter 3, pg. 35

“Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motorcar, she thought ritually, a sound principle being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.”
– Chapter 9, pg. 95

“A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. 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, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow's flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past.” – Chapter 14, pg. 265

“How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.” – Chapter 14, pg. 330

So those were some of my favorite book quotes from Atonement by Ian McEwan.

Man, Ian McEwan is a great writer! This book could have had zero plot and I still would have loved every sentence. He has a gift for describing the complex thought processes of his characters in a way that is almost poetic. The scene where Briony sits in the nursery (before witnessing the exchange between Robbie and her older sister) is pure genius. Pure literary genius. And on top of that, the plot is incredible. How often do you find a book with a

storyline that hasn't been done before? Not that often. Seeing the movie before reading the book (usually a no-no, but who could resist Keira Knightly and James McAvoy?) only made it that much better because I could follow the story when it jumped around. Plus, I had plenty of time for my anger to dissipate (I'm obviously referring to the "Just kidding! That didn't actually happen!" ending that left most people fuming mad). The funniest thing is that I actually thought Atonement was an old book – old as in written 50 years ago. I’ve heard his other books are hit-or-miss, so I guess I’ll just have to see if I still love his writing when the plot isn’t so epic.