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f9751f3
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Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I'll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which ..
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Ian McEwan |
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6117607
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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05969a6
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When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.
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marriage
love
truth
memory
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Ian McEwan |
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c5b7aa8
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Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.
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waiting
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Ian McEwan |
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a013b60
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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 you have to others, but lose nothing of ..
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Ian McEwan |
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547ab68
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We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, 'foreplay'. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phra..
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Ian McEwan |
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5a7a601
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She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.
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Ian McEwan |
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6f933b2
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It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy
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Ian McEwan |
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b82d132
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Non badavo granche a tematiche o felicita di stile, e saltavo le descrizioni minute di tempo atmosferico, paesaggi e interni. Volevo personaggi in cui potessi credere, e volevo provare curiosita per cio che avrebbero vissuto. [...] Romanzi a sensazione, alta letteratura e tutto cio che stava nel mezzo: a ognuno riservavo lo stesso rude trattamento.
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quotes
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Ian McEwan |
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44e43f9
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Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.
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Ian McEwan |
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66212f4
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He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.
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Ian McEwan |
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0e1b534
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His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them.
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Ian McEwan |
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398b153
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But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least duri..
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Ian McEwan |
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2db5267
|
No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.
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Ian McEwan |
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9ab7e96
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No one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
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Ian McEwan |
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7a805e4
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There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
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books
writers
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Ian McEwan |
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71acc68
|
But of course, it had all been her - by her and about her, 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
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Ian McEwan |
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8543c29
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What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife.
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Ian McEwan |
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5f1ccc6
|
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.
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Ian McEwan |
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8e80f66
|
How quickly the dead faded into each other,
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fade
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Ian McEwan |
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805aec5
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In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.
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Ian McEwan |
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cb5c7c3
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Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There'll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitch..
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revenge
maths
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Ian McEwan |
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4ba5278
|
It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.
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Ian McEwan |
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ba950ff
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The past had shown him many times that the future would be its own solution.
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solar
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Ian McEwan |
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34217bd
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Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially a..
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Ian McEwan |
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c84ceba
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Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose.
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rival
penis
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Ian McEwan |
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5f19ad8
|
It's shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum's sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
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Ian McEwan |
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20608b8
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Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.
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knowledge
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Ian McEwan |
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d5a92d7
|
Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
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Ian McEwan |
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35aff73
|
What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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Ian McEwan |
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ce1e688
|
Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.
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Ian McEwan |
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6fd4f70
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The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.
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Ian McEwan |
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5dd73e5
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Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal.
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Ian McEwan |
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55493aa
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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b6a126f
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I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, ...
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Ian McEwan |
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df47742
|
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.
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Ian McEwan |
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22f7c94
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Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well 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.
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Ian McEwan |
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e58e9d0
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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.
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Ian McEwan |
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b9616a6
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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-p..
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Ian McEwan |
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1d7d60f
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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.
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robbie
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Ian McEwan |
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ab4a762
|
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
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Ian McEwan |
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9a444ad
|
Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.
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Ian McEwan |
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f5463c3
|
Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?
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Ian McEwan |
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2db0f6c
|
How do you feel?' Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.' But you don't look it.' I feel I'm shivering inside.
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Ian McEwan |