One Could Drown In Irrelevance.

Novels Help Us To Resist The Temptation To Think Of The Past As Deficient.

She Loved Him, Though Not At This Particular Moment.

One Has To Have The Courage Of One's Pessimism.

Had It Taken Her This Long To Discover That She Lacked Some Simple Mental Trick That Everyone Else Had, A Mechanism So Ordinary That No One Ever Mentioned It, An Immediate Sensual Connection To People And Events, And To Her Own Needs And Desires? All These Years She Had Lived In Isolation Within Herself And, Strangely, From Herself, Never Wanting Or Daring To Look Back.

Briony Began To Understand The Chasm That Lay Between An Idea And Its Execution.