How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph) or (Part.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Everything connected. It was her own discovery. It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her.
"It was Robbie, wasn't it?" (1.13, 1.27-28)
This is the moment when Briony decides that Robbie raped Lola. She puts him into her story—and so starts to treat him like a thing, rather than a person. She destroys his life because it makes for a better plot. Is this any different from what Briony does in writing Atonement?
Quote #8
"I'm not going to go away," she wrote in her first letter after Liverpool. "I'll wait for you. Come back." She was quoting herself. (2.94)
Cecilia first says, "I'll wait for you. Come back" when Robbie is taken away by the police. She then puts it at the end of all her letters to him. It takes on more meaning because it is twice said—or three times said, or four, since Briony is writing down in a novel what Cecilia said in a letter quoting herself.
Quote #9
She began her journal at the end of the first day of preliminary training, and managed at least ten minutes most nights before lights-out. […] This was the only place she could be free. […] In later years she regretted not being more factual, not providing herself with a store of raw material. It would have been useful to know what happened, what it looked like, who was there, and what was said. At the time, the journal preserved her dignity […] (3.22)
Briony's writing here about the journal she kept as a student nurse. There's a parallel between how her writing preserves her freedom and sense of self and the way that Robbie lives on the letters he gets from Cecilia. Writing in Atonement sometimes can save your life. That's why Briony writes Atonement, which saves Robbie and Cecilia… on paper anyway. Note also where Briony says she would regret in later years that she wasn't more factual. When does she need all these details about the hospital? Surely she needs them when she actually writes Atonement, the book you're reading.