Riv’s Reviews > Atonement > Status Update

“Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn’t there somewhere else for people to go?”

“But of course, it has all been her—by her and about her—and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky.”

“Amo amas amat,” she said

“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy; it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

“She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive.”

“It was a temptation for her to be magical and dramatic, and to regard what she had witnessed as a tableau mounted for her alone, a special moral for her wrapped in a mystery. But she knew very well that if she had not stood when she did, the scene would still have happened, for it was not about her at all.”

“One could drown in irrelevance.”