Writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of minaturisation. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm… Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so… A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the last page.
- Ian McEwan, Atonement : 7.
