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8c7cf2c
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However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you're inside them.
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limitations
relationships
limits
mystery
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Ian McEwan |
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0d10e27
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She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.
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silence
not-saying
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Ian McEwan |
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3a55609
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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8c8aed4
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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....
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Ian McEwan |
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b443ad2
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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.
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misreading
language
misunderstanding
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Ian McEwan |
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24d967b
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I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.
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Ian McEwan |
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953bb9f
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In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime's pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of poss..
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Ian McEwan |
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1c8ac2c
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Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's .
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Ian McEwan |
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354e51a
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It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in -- but there it was; she couldn't resist moving them around, and 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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0302d53
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He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.
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resignation
procrastination
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Ian McEwan |
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96472ba
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There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
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Ian McEwan |
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304c3fd
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In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.
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Ian McEwan |
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90cde0e
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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. 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....Briony had lost her godly power of creation, but it was only at this moment of return that the loss became evident; part of a daydream's enticement was the il..
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Ian McEwan |
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5750d77
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He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.
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Ian McEwan |
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d89bf51
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Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do - here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared.
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Ian McEwan |
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56f02f7
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The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
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Ian McEwan |
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f9bd45d
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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?
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reading
education
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Ian McEwan |
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029e32c
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the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
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Ian McEwan |
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e380594
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Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.
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Ian McEwan |
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f38c9f3
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A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he's absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it's possible he could have been ali..
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Ian McEwan |
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19edea1
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Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.
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Ian McEwan |
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28065a8
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i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
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mad
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Ian McEwan |
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3f2ef7a
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Nothing as singular or as important had happened since the day of his birth. She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty in a face which a lifetime's habit had taught her to ignore. She whispered his name with the deliberation of a child trying out the distinct sounds. When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word - the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different..
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Ian McEwan |
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9c22ce7
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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
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Ian McEwan |
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74d4773
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they knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious compromises, attending to delicate shifts of mood, repairing breaches. As individuals they didn't easily take offense; but together they managed to offend each other in surprising, unexpected ways; then the offender - it had happened twice sinc..
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Ian McEwan |
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81d94fe
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Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.
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Ian McEwan |
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89f1e9a
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It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people."
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youth
opinion
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Ian McEwan |
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aab78a8
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It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.
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Ian McEwan |
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26bed7c
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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.
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pain
war
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Ian McEwan |
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d81621e
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The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future,
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lovers
page-128
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Ian McEwan |
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46ffe66
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He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life.
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Ian McEwan |
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006c0f2
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Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
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Ian McEwan |
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5bbffe4
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But here's life's most limiting truth - it's always now, always here, never then and there. And
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Ian McEwan |
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a20f1d2
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No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.
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Ian McEwan |
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5b3ae7f
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But even I know that love doesn't steer by logic, nor is power distributed evenly. Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as wells as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. Memories are poor for past failures. Childhoods shine th..
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Ian McEwan |
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d8b1de5
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When he replied with her name, it sounded like a new word -- the syllables remained the same, the meaning was different.
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Ian McEwan |
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35302ee
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution
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Ian McEwan |
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6ecbbd6
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He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.
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men
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Ian McEwan |
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54b1f8f
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Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
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futility
humor
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Ian McEwan |
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a6e3ee4
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Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.
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Ian McEwan |
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7332cc5
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Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.
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Ian McEwan |
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b848548
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I squeezed her hand and said nothing. I knew little about Keats or his poetry, but I thought it possible that in his hopeless situation he would not have wanted to write precisely because he loved her so much. Lately I'd had the idea that Clarissa's interest in these hypothetical letters had something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect. In the months a..
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Ian McEwan |
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b7e2811
|
She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity?
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Ian McEwan |
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f9ad1d3
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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.
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confidence
wisdom
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Ian McEwan |