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dab1c76
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Initially, a simple phrase chased round and round in Cecilia's thoughts: Of course, of course. How had she not seen it? Everything was explained. The whole day, the weeks before, her childhood. A lifetime. It was clear to her now. Why else take so long to choose a dress, or fight over a vase, or find everything so different, or be unable to leave? What had made her so blind, so obtuse?
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Ian McEwan |
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3be8802
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Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.
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Ian McEwan |
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e1dd9e0
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My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.
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Ian McEwan |
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71a77d8
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Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.
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Ian McEwan |
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934f1d3
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The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn't say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don't know you very well, are likely to think you're rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
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Ian McEwan |
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6159537
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W]riting stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages....The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically empathic sentence, falling in love would be achieved in a single word--a .
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Ian McEwan |
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eaec01c
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There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.
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Ian McEwan |
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3aec10e
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So here I am, upside down in a woman.
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Ian McEwan |
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41ce90a
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Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.
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option
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Ian McEwan |
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6341d65
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Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, [Briony] learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
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body
philosophy
truth
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Ian McEwan |
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436e06e
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The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.
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Ian McEwan |
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8da56bc
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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,
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Ian McEwan |
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5e1666a
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This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.
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Ian McEwan |
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674d087
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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929d47c
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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 the happiness and convenience of so many good people would be put at risk.
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Ian McEwan |
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d695735
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I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!
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fate
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Ian McEwan |
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c3e1cae
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But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me
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mysogyny
possession
sex
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Ian McEwan |
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87b1b42
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Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air
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Ian McEwan |
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df31007
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Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.
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Ian McEwan |
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7579a27
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I said I didn't like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn't possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.
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Ian McEwan |
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461e4f6
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Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her underwear tumbling from drawers she never closed, a big ironing board that was never folded away, and in the one overfilled wardrobe dresses , crushed and shouldering sideways like commuters on the metro. Magazines, makeup, bank statements, be..
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Ian McEwan |
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d231a8f
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The thing about Satan is that he's amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people's minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn't exist after all, and then he's free to do his worst.
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Ian McEwan |
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f39de98
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In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and qhen she stood on the driveway, she decided she would stay there and wait until something significant happened to her. This was the challenge she was putting to existence - she would not stir, not for dinner, not ever for her mother calling her in. She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies..
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Ian McEwan |
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6898bf8
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and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere.
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Ian McEwan |
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d02b1f4
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As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.
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Ian McEwan |
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f7588a9
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When he wrote back, he pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity. For fear of his psychiatrist who was also their censor, they could never be sensual, or even emotional. His was considered a modern, enlightened prison, despite its Victorian chill. He had been diagnosed, with clinical precision, as morbidly oversexed, and in need of help as well as correction. He was not to be stimulated. Some letters--both his and hers--were..
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Ian McEwan |
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d65f280
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They had had half an hour. He walked with her to Whitehall, toward the bus stop. In the precious final minutes he wrote out his address for her, a bleak sequence of acronyms and numbers. "then, at last, he took her hand and squeezed. The gesture had to carry all that had not been said, and she answered it with pressure from her own hand. Her bus came, and she did not let go. They were standing face to face. He kissed her, lightly at first, ..
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Ian McEwan |
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3d2d684
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What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.
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Ian McEwan |
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a39c5d8
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Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric,' a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation,..
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Ian McEwan |
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3763ed0
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The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other
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Ian McEwan |
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23a6aaf
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This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.
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Ian McEwan |
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93e0f56
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her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect.
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Ian McEwan |
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357bd6b
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It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
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self-centeredness
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Ian McEwan |
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32cde2c
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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 the beginning of the invention of the self...God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.
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pain
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Ian McEwan |
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0d6694a
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As we walked back to the car, Johnny said, "A tree's one thing, but it's a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically, you're giving them permission to kill you."
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Ian McEwan |
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66ea7df
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Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.
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parents
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Ian McEwan |
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b786c9e
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This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. ... So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision ... it already has the quality of an idea ... unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond him..
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Ian McEwan |
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56ffe77
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It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid--and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.
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Ian McEwan |
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35cf8ec
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since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.
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Ian McEwan |
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b827956
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She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the street, or any public place, not on entering a room, not standing up, and only when offered, never from her own supply - notions as self evident to him as natural justice. Three years among the sophisticates of Girton had not provided her with coura..
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Ian McEwan |
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090a146
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When she found a place of her own and packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear, "He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she's there all day." --
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love
marriage
proposal
relationship
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Ian McEwan |
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28fcd12
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By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.
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Ian McEwan |
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ca86462
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Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button?
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Ian McEwan |
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2328640
|
I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself.
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Ian McEwan |