Ian McEwan Quotes

Ian McEwan Quotes

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

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

Either I've always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don't know what it means.

There was[is] something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor His absence could be blamed.

…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

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

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.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

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.

We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

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

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home-Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. -Solar

Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did a girl love him before? Could she continue to?

This is what he disliked about political people – injustice and calamity animated them, it was their milk, their lifeblood, it pleasured them.

My pleasure in reading is not necessarily the witnessing of something new, but of something familiar which I haven't seen described.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air

But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me

Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.

These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.

The very word 'history' conjured a dull success of thrones and murderous clerical wrangling.

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.

…the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.

Then, with an extended, falling glissando of disgust, the whole string section, plus flutes and piccolo, surged toward the brass, leaving the music critic and his deed - an early evening frites and mayonnaise on Oude Hoogstraat - illuminated under a lonely chandelier.

The quiet gravity really wasn't his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.

...children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.

I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

It's a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it's bound to, this will be the one act you'll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it's among others that we have to live and their judgements matter. - Pg. 198

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.

He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.

You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

Share Page

Ian McEwan Wiki

Ian McEwan At Amazon

Best Quotes Ever Topics

Best Quotes Ever Authors