Ian Mcewan Quotes

Instead, she found her argument in the "doctrine of necessity," an idea established in common law that in certain limited circumstances, which no parliament would ever care to define, it was permissible to break the criminal law to prevent a greater evil. ~ Ian McEwan

Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out. ~ Ian McEwan

Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution ~ Ian McEwan

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent - how the tilt of a skull could change a life! - Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from ~ Ian McEwan

She took out an Ian McEwan book, flicked through it and said, 'I love this. I can't bear people who don't read. I think they must have something wrong with them, don't you?' 'I guess so.' 'Books, music, art, films.' She held up her glass. 'Good wine. It's what life's all about.' I held up my own glass. 'To books, music, art, films and wine. ~ Mark Edwards

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think. ~ Ian McEwan

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote. ~ Ian McEwan

What is lawful is not always identical to what is right. ~ Ian McEwan

Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn't, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts -- one dim light bulb. ~ Ian McEwan

Get in first and shape the terms. ~ Ian McEwan

One thing about the fantasy dinner party idea that no one considers is whether these people are going to get on. I would say John McEnroe and Ian McEwan, but what would they have to say to each other? ~ Robert Webb

We often tell ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked. ~ Ian McEwan

For love doesn't stand alone, nor can it, but trails like a blazing comet, bringing with it other shining goods - forgiveness, kindness, tolerance, fairness, companionability and friendship, all bound to the love which is at the heart of Jesus's message. ~ Ian McEwan

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 ~ Ian McEwan

But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill ... ~ Ian McEwan

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. ~ Ian McEwan

He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [ ... ] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. ~ Ian McEwan

Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes. ~ Ian McEwan

Unless, unless, unless--a wisp of a word, ghostly token of altered fate, bleating little iamb of hope, it drifts across my thoughts like a floater in the vitreous humour of an eye. Mere hope. ~ Ian McEwan

At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened. ~ Ian McEwan

'the softest, sweetest part of the Cold War, the only truly interesting part, the war of ideas. ~ Ian McEwan

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

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now. ~ Ian McEwan

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. ~ Ian McEwan

A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again. ~ Ian McEwan

Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no. ~ Ian McEwan

Only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards. ~ Ian McEwan

But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. ~ Ian McEwan

o here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I'm in, what I'm in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults, colliding gently against the transparent bounds of my confinement, the confiding membrane that vibrated with, even as it muffled, the voices of conspirators in a vile enterprise. That was in my careless youth. Now, fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against my belly, my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged. I've no choice, my ear is pressed all day and night against the bloody walls. I listen, make mental notes, and I'm troubled. I'm hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and I'm terrified by what awaits me, by what might draw me in. ~ Ian McEwan

Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there. ~ Ian McEwan

My affair with Trudy isn't going well. I thought I could take her love for granted. But I've heard biologists debating at dawn. Pregnant mothers must fight the tenants of their wombs. Nature, a mother herself, ordains a struggle for resources that may be needed to nurture my future sibling rivals. My health derives from Trudy, but she must preserve herself against me. So why would she worry about my feelings? If it's in her interests and those of some unconceived squit that I should be undernourished, why trouble herself if a tryst with my uncle upsets me? ~ Ian McEwan

Yes, her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight- this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist- a flight from her proper destiny. Her failure to become a woman, as her mother understood the term. ~ Ian McEwan

In our decline we live in the shadow of giants. ~ Ian McEwan

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare. ~ Ruth Rendell

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. ~ Ian McEwan

Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies ~ Ian McEwan

Steve Earle, the thinking man's Bruce Springsteen, ~ Ian McEwan

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia. ~ Ian McEwan

He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged. ~ Ian McEwan

It is the world that shapes people's minds. It is men who have shaped the world. So women's minds are shaped by men. From earliest childhood, the world they see is made by men. Now the women lie to themselves and there is confusion and unhappiness everywhere. ~ Ian McEwan

And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa ~ Ian McEwan

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. ~ Ian McEwan

Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn. ~ Ian McEwan

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. ~ Ian McEwan

This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity...He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist. ~ Ian McEwan

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was. ~ Ian McEwan

It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. ~ Ian McEwan

She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime. ~ Ian McEwan

Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place. ~ Ian McEwan

... he felt unusually warm toward humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was. ~ Ian McEwan

It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity. ~ Ian McEwan

But this inglorious revolution wasn't for me. I didn't want a sex shop in every town. ~ Ian McEwan

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. ~ Ian McEwan

But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things. ~ Ian McEwan

Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end. ~ Ian McEwan

All this happiness on display is suspect ... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view. ~ Ian McEwan

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 were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract. ~ Ian McEwan

Everyone believed that to be caught out in a shameful moment when neck muscles relax and the head snaps forward might damage career prospects. But believing was not quite enough. Heavy eyelids in the late afternoon had their own logic, their own peculiar weight. ~ Ian McEwan

He really believes that to write a poem in praise of my mother (her eyes, her hair, her lips) and come by to read it aloud will soften her, make him welcome in his own house. ~ Ian McEwan

Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose. ~ Ian McEwan

When I began I thought that literature was contained within a bubble that somehow floated above the world commented upon by newspapers. But I became more and more interested in trying to include some of that world within my work. ~ Ian McEwan

Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought. ~ Ian McEwan

He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse. ~ Ian McEwan

He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now. ~ Ian McEwan

Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range? ~ Ian McEwan

Politics is the enemy of the imagination. ~ Ian McEwan

We've built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It's dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed. ~ Ian McEwan

And behind all this human movement the ocean bobbed and folded and slid, for nothing could keep still, not people, not water, not time. ~ Ian McEwan

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed. ~ Ian McEwan

So much for youthful idealism. ~ Ian McEwan

... 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. ~ Ian McEwan

Her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect. ~ Ian McEwan

Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world. ~ Ian McEwan

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word. ~ Ian McEwan

Tooled cowboy boots, engraved hip flask and, in recognition of his new passion for geology, a nineteenth-century explorer's specimen hammer in a leather case. To bless his second adolescence on turning fifty, a trumpet that had once belonged to Guy Barker. These offerings represented only a fraction of the happiness she urged on him, and sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice. ~ Ian McEwan

It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expected their approval. ~ Ian McEwan

Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it's a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are. ~ Ian McEwan

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient. ~ Ian McEwan

That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster's cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to Naomi. It is at times like these that his life makes sense. How soothing it is, the scent of clean bedlinen and minty toothpaste breath, and his children's eagerness to hear the adventures of imaginary beings, and how touching, to watch the children's eyes grow heavy as they struggle to hang on to the priceless last minutes of their day, and finally fail. ~ Ian McEwan

She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. ~ Ian McEwan

He did. He researched her. Someone told him that she had a special interest in John Milton. It did not take long to discover the century to which this man belonged. A third-year literature student in Beard's college who owed him a favor (for procuring tickets to a Cream concert) gave him an hour on Milton, what to read, what to think. He read "Comus" and was astounded by its silliness. He read through "Lycidas," "Samson Agonistes," and "Il Penseroso" - stilted and rather prissy in parts, he thought. He fared better with "Paradise Lost" and, like many before him, preferred Satan's party to God's. He, Beard, that is, memorized passages that appeared to him intelligent and especially sonorous. He read a biography, and four essays that he had been told were pivotal. The reading took him one long week. He came close to being thrown out of an antiquarian bookshop in the Turl when he casually asked for a first edition of "Paradise Lost." He tracked down a kindly tutor who knew about buying old books and confided to him that he wanted to impress a girl with a certain kind of present, and was directed to a bookshop in Covent Garden where he spent half a term's money on an eighteenth-century edition of "Areopagitica." When he speed-read it on the train back to Oxford, one of the pages cracked in two. He repaired it with Sellotape. ~ Ian McEwan

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. ~ Ian McEwan

She lay in the dark and knew everything. ~ Ian McEwan

Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I said "No, thanks, I think I'll stick at this." ~ Ian McEwan

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore. ~ Ian McEwan

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn. ~ Ian McEwan

Something is missing in our culture. We can't quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition. ~ Ian McEwan

He thought about telling them of his own single, haunting detail. But he didn't want to add to the horror, and nor did he want to give life to the image while it remained at a distance, held there by wine and companionship. ~ Ian McEwan

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days). ~ Ian McEwan

Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth. ~ Ian McEwan

year-old girl. It was more than a habit, for a habit could be broken. This was a deep disposition, the outline experience had stencilled on character. It was not ~ Ian McEwan

She belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ. ~ Ian McEwan

In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She'll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning. ~ Ian McEwan

We couldn't free ourselves into the present. Instead we wanted to think about setting other people free. We wanted to think about their unhappiness. We used their wretchedness to mask our own. And our wretchedness was our inability to take the simple good things life was offering us and be glad to have them. ~ Ian McEwan

If she went, what was he going to do with all these loving facts, these torturing details? If she wasn't with him, how would he bear all this knowledge of her alone? The force of these considerations drove the words out of them, they came as easily as breath. "I love you," he said. ~ Ian McEwan

These thoughts were as familiar to her, and as comforting, as the precise configuration of her knees, their matching but competing, symmetrical and reversible, look. A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probably that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it. ~ Ian McEwan

Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it's among others that we have to live and their judgments matter. ~ Ian McEwan

If someone where playing tennis you wouldn't walk onto the court and begin to have a conversion with them, likewise I think reading is at least as important as a game of tennis. ~ Ian McEwan

What can it be about low temperatures
that sharpens the edges of objects? ~ Ian McEwan

Reading was my way of not thinking about maths. More than that (or do I mean less?), it was my way of not thinking. ~ Ian McEwan