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89c5a10
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She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn't let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.
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war
memories
robbie
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Ian McEwan |
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e1c1e91
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He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy
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Ian McEwan |
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30021be
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Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted ..
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Ian McEwan |
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a0b1858
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She left the cafe, and as she walked along the Common she felt the distance widen between her and another self, no less real, who was walking back toward the hospital. Perhaps the Briony who was walking in the direction of Balham was the imagined or ghostly persona. This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyon..
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Ian McEwan |
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20f1b24
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Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on.
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Ian McEwan |
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f572f05
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This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.
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Ian McEwan |
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8882536
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Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.
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Ian McEwan |
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6df2770
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These were the months that shaped us.behind all our frustrations over all these years has been the wish to get back to those happy days.Once we began to see the world differently we could feel time running out on us and we were impatient with each other.Every disagreement was an interruption of what we knew was possible-and soon there was only interruption.And in the end time did run out,but memories are still there,accusing us,and we still..
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Ian McEwan |
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f0bb997
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The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.
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Ian McEwan |
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4a50286
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When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.
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family-relationships
war
inspiration
family
love
soldiers
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Ian McEwan |
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dd9330c
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Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showe..
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ian-mcewan
world-war-ii
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Ian McEwan |
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4565502
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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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881ffb2
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She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
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Ian McEwan |
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edee6a0
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At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn.
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science
humor
ian-mcewan
physics
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Ian McEwan |
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25b050e
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Each day he made attempts ... but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free of its own idiom, its own authority, to offer the element of surprise that would be the guarantee of originality.
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Ian McEwan |
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7e502df
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Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures.
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Ian McEwan |
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a385565
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This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind. That was all London was beyond its center, an agglomeration of dull little towns. She made a resolution never to live in any of them.
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Ian McEwan |
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d3214d1
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He found and praised Muriel Spark's . I said I found it too schematic and preferred . He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem.
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Ian McEwan |
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fdd85d1
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I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.
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Ian McEwan |
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c4c9243
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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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f471557
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Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.
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Ian McEwan |