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92d1f46
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The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.
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bryoni
daydreams
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Ian McEwan |
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e65ad35
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I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.
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Ian McEwan |
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903e997
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Who you get, and how it works out- there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.
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Ian McEwan |
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acbecfd
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He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
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Ian McEwan |
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a4192fd
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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Ian McEwan |
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c552419
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Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning...
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Ian McEwan |
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4f8aab0
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But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
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Ian McEwan |
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a96efcc
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I'll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn't touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.
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Ian McEwan |
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7ca8f02
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beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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Ian McEwan |
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0858cf8
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They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonish..
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sex
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Ian McEwan |
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21f44c6
|
Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.
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Ian McEwan |
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8ca8d79
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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. It was like a w..
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Ian McEwan |
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56939ae
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Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?
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Ian McEwan |
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58ab86a
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It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
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Ian McEwan |
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eeea4ba
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But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the s, the s, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness;..
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Ian McEwan |
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246331a
|
How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?
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Ian McEwan |
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c1e3f91
|
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
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on-chesil-beach
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Ian McEwan |
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1d40457
|
In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: 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. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crook..
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Ian McEwan |
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3ca12e0
|
Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.
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Ian McEwan |
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bf87d96
|
one could drown in irrelevance.
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Ian McEwan |
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f80886c
|
Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.
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Ian McEwan |
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a02a6c1
|
It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
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mutation
natural-selection
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Ian McEwan |
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83886d7
|
Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.
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Ian McEwan |
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1c60b22
|
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth
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Ian McEwan |
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bf54e3f
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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4dd89ba
|
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.
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Ian McEwan |
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66b7b24
|
A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen . The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options - neutrois, two spirit, bigender...any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there..
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social-justice
social-media
university
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Ian McEwan |
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6a89a63
|
It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.
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Ian McEwan |
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eca2646
|
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.
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Ian McEwan |
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cbc8d3b
|
Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
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Ian McEwan |
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aaa9a27
|
We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.
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Ian McEwan |
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ed2fd2e
|
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
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Ian McEwan |
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d3a1c56
|
However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.
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Ian McEwan |
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f8182c0
|
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
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Ian McEwan |
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0f21bfc
|
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
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work
|
Ian McEwan |
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f5c6958
|
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
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kissing
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Ian McEwan |
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6733706
|
He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
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Ian McEwan |
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88d4686
|
When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in-you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we'regoing to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto - think small.
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Ian McEwan |
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bcc057a
|
Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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Ian McEwan |
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56f46f7
|
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.
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Ian McEwan |
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84af0a8
|
Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.
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Ian McEwan |
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002eb99
|
I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.
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Ian McEwan |
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e80b2d1
|
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..
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Ian McEwan |
|
27864b8
|
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.
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Ian McEwan |