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2570956
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When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.
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love
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Ian McEwan |
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b6cffca
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A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
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Ian McEwan |
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43ac7ce
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It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
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Ian McEwan |
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b19ed6b
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The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
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imagination
fantasy
dreams
life
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Ian McEwan |
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04f50ac
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This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.
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Ian McEwan |
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25325b9
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Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... 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.
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self
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Ian McEwan |
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4145f14
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falling in love could be achieved in a single word--a glance.
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Ian McEwan |
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0e4ad8a
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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267b5ac
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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
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Ian McEwan |
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1fac6f6
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And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.
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life
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Ian McEwan |
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4df9a42
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Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
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Ian McEwan |
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ee555fc
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Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
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gender-stereotypes
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Ian McEwan |
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40e3773
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I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee
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Ian McEwan |
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11cd873
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She lay in the dark and knew everything.
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Ian McEwan |
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b5e0f36
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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
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fingernails
manicure
nails
despair
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Ian McEwan |
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a3824bd
|
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.
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Ian McEwan |
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b450a44
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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fdf2ed6
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Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw i..
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lust
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Ian McEwan |
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d629aa5
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All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
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Ian McEwan |
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2411ac2
|
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The at..
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Ian McEwan |
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7a83a60
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
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Ian McEwan |
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8c70bb7
|
In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.
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Ian McEwan |
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9970913
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come back, come back to me
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Ian McEwan |
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118bbf7
|
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
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Ian McEwan |
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f76d3f1
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But what happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
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Ian McEwan |
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57ef2a1
|
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.
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madness
lovers
love
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Ian McEwan |
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0579f9d
|
It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.
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photography
mortality
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Ian McEwan |
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d0f2312
|
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.
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life
love
ian-mcewan
love-conquers-all
sad
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Ian McEwan |
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d763977
|
And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?
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Ian McEwan |
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676317f
|
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
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Ian McEwan |
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b55820e
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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.
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hope
longing
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Ian McEwan |
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675a574
|
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
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Ian McEwan |
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8234b67
|
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
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writing
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Ian McEwan |
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aa1c9a8
|
Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.
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Ian McEwan |
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fb752b8
|
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
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Ian McEwan |
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fd4f45d
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This is how the entire course of life can be changed - by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Inste..
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Ian McEwan |
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27794ff
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There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.
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Ian McEwan |
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399c2af
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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.
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heaven
life
waking-up
dreaming
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Ian McEwan |
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0fd7bdc
|
The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.
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Ian McEwan |
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1974973
|
It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.
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Ian McEwan |
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e085349
|
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."
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Ian McEwan |
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50dc823
|
For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief--how could they ever be other than what they are?
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time
time-passing
innocence
childhood
nostalgia
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Ian McEwan |
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a62f2d7
|
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.
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Ian McEwan |
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e6ad6c3
|
When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.
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marriage
|
Ian McEwan |