Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence.
Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.
Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.
What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?
Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.
I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair,...
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.
If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.
Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth.
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment’s thought, and that would take time.
By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State.
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
He’s never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.