Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flig... - Ian McEwan, Atonement

"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."

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

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

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

"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?"