Ian McEwan, Atonement

"She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?"

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse."

"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."

"The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him."

"And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you."

"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"

"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."

"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."

"A story was a form of telepathy. 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."