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?