When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.

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

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.