Ian McEwan

Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

In difficult moments it__ sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can__, move on to the second best thing.

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future,

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.

She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.