I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.
He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now.
Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution
When anything can happen, everything matters.
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that...
Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning...
I’ll wait for you. Come back.The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now.It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emoti...
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 th...
I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are...
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life.
Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.
Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a pr...
He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.
This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginn...
This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyond its center, an agglom...