He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.
Ian McEwan, Atonement.
“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 goo...”
“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she we...”
“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. ”
“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”
“He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.”
“Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.”
“Being a dad is quite rewarding and even magical at times. It is our greatest chance to do something right in our lives that will keep making the world a brighter place even generations after we are...”
“I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?”
“Sigmund Freud, the father of psychiatry and an atheist, theorized that ones attitude toward ones father largely shaped ones attitude toward God.”
“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”
“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”
“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”