Atonement Flashcards
Quotes
“There were moments…she made her heart thud with luminous, yearning fantasies…”
Pg 4 chapter 1. Briony.
“She was one of those children possessed by the desire to have the world just so.”
Pg 4 chapter 1. Briony.
“Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel.”
Pg 5 chapter 1. Briony.
“…beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation.”
Pg 7 chapter 1 Briony.
“Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of a lifelong union.”
Pg 9 chapter 1. Briony.
“A good wedding was an unacknowledged representation of the yet unthinkable - sexual bliss.”
Pg 9 chapter 1. Briony.
“Briony felt the disadvantage of being two years younger than the other girl, of having a full two year’s refinement weight against her, and now her play seemed a miserable, embarrassing thing.”
Pg 13 chapter 1. Briony.
“Self-pity needed her full attention..”
Pg 15 chapter 1. Briony.
“As for Lola she spoke her lines correctly but casually, and sometimes smiled inappropriately at some private thought, determined to demonstrate that her nearly adult mind was elsewhere.”
Pg 16 chapter 1. Briony.
“Now there was talk of medical college, which after a literature degree seemed rather pretentious. And presumptuous too, since it was her father who would have to pay.”
Pg 18 chapter 2. Cecelia.
“There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.”
Pg 25 chapter 2. Cecelia,
“Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?”
Pg 26 chapter 2. Cecelia.
“She thought how she should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to.”
Pg 35 chapter 3. Briony.
“If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, which two billon voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life just as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”
Pg 36 chapter3. Briony.
“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.”
Pg 37 chapter 3. Briony.
“She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her.”
Pg 38 chapter 3. Briony.
“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was the confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”
Pg 40 chapter 3. Briony.
“Briony had her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passes between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong.”
Pg 39 chapter 3. Briony.
Cecelia wondered…and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.
Pg 47 chapter 4. Cecelia upon meeting Paul Marshall.
She had noticed him hanging around the children lately. Perhaps he was interested in Lola. He was sixteen, and certainly no boy.
Pg 48 chapter 4. Cecelia talking about Danny Hardman.
All day long, she realised, she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.
Pg 48 chapter 4. Cecelia. Foreshadowing.
It…and again, she felt it: it had happened a long time ago, and all outcomes, on all scales - from the tiniest to the most colossal - were already in place. Whatever happened in the future, however superficially strange or shocking, would have an unsurprising, familiar quality, inviting her to say, but only to herself, Oh yes, of course. That. I should have known.
Pg 53 chapter 4. Cecelia.
She thought a game was being played which she did not understand, but she was certain there had been an impropriety, or even an insult.
Pg 59 chapter 5. Lola.
“Now he saw that the girl was almost a young woman…”
Pg 60 chapter 5. Paul Marshall.
“…into a light sleep in which his young sisters had appeared…standing around his bedside, prattling and touching and pulling at his clothes.”
And
“D’you know, you remind me of my favourite sister…”
Pg 60 and 61 chapter 5. Paul Marshall.
“…a little squeal of laughter abruptly smothered.”
Pg 69 chapter 6. Emily.
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
Pg 77 chapter 7. Briony.
Danny Hardman was there too, leering at their sister when he should have been at work.
Pg 88 chapter 8. Robbie.
It was an awkward age in a girl, he thought contentedly. Twelve, or was it thirteen?
Pg 94 chapter 8. Robbie.
The very complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion…
Pg 113 chapter 10. Briony.
Above all, she had wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment’s thought, and that would take time.
Pg 97 chapter 9. Robbie.
With the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principal of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help.
Pg 114 chapter 10. Briony.
She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.
Pg 115 chapter 10. Briony.
I mean, I’ve been seeing strangely, as if for the first time. Everything has looked different - too sharp, too real. Even my own hands looked different. At other times I seem to be watching events as if they happened long ago. And all day I’ve been furious with you - and with myself.
Pg 133 chapter 11. Cecelia.
They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future.
Pg 136 chapter 11.
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty in a face which a lifetime’s habit has taught her to ignore.
Pg 137 chapter 11. Cecelia.
Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen.
Pg 137 chapter 11. Robbie.
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.
Pg 137 chapter 11. Robbie.
At this stage in her life Briony inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably.
Pg 141 chapter 11. Robbie.
Paul Marshall cleared his throat. “I saw it myself - had to say break it up and pull them off her. I have to say, I was surprised, little fellows like that. They went for her all right…”
Pg 141 chapter 11.
He spoke behind Cecelia and Robbie’s head to the young girl who stared as her eyes filled with tears. “There’s no shame in making a fuss, you know. You’re awfully brave, but you have taken a bad knock.”
Pg 142 chapter 11. Paul Marshall.
Robbie wanted to know why Marshall has not mentioned the matter before if Lola has been so badly harmed, but the table was now in commotion.
Pg 142 chapter 11.
…if he could not have her to himself, then he too, like Briony, would go out searching alone. This decision, as he was to acknowledge many times, transformed his life.
Pg 144 chapter 11. RObbie.
“But really, he was a hobby of Jack’s, living proof of some levelling principle he had pursued through the years.”
Pg 151. Chapter 12, Emily.
But to be an object of adult hatred was an initiation into a solemn new world. It was promotion.
Pg 157, chapter 13. Briony.
This was exactly what no one would have expected, and of course - villains were not announced with hisses or soliloquies, they did not come cloaked in black, with ugly expressions.
Pg 158, chapter 13. Briony.
Everything connected. It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.
Pg 166, chapter 13. Briony.
“It was Robbie, wasn’t it?”
“Briony said it again, this time without the trace of a question. It was a statement of fact. It was Robbie.”
Pg 166, chapter 13. Briony.
Because I couldn’t say for sure. I mean, I thought it might be him by his voice.
What did he say?
Nothing.
Pg 167, chapter 13. Briony.
As far as she was concerned, everything fitted; the terrible present fulfilled the recent past.
Pg 168, chapter 13. Briony.
The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense.
Pg 169, chapter 13. Briony.
She was like a bride-to-be who begins to feel her sickening qualms as the day approaches, and dares not speak her mind because so many preparations have been made on her behalf.
Pg 169, chapter 13. Briony.
Could be foreshadowing to Lola’s wedding with Paul.
Less like seeing, more like knowing.
Pg 170, chapter 13. Briony.
She trapped herself, she marched into a labyrinth of her own construction,….
Pg 170, chapter 13. Briony.
Her doubts could be neutralised only by plunging in deeper.
Pg 170 pg 13. Briony.
“It’s our secret.”
“I won’t say a word.”
“Wake me before seven. I promise, you won’t hear another word from me.”
pg 265 robbie
“We catch this girl at the dawn of her selfhood.”
pg 312 briony
“There was a crime. But there were also lovers.”
pg 380
“The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?”
“There is no one, no entity or higher form she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her.”
Pg 371 Briony
“I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end.”
“I gave them happiness but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me.”
Pg 372, Briony
