Quotes from Ian Mcewan

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history's largesse.

Not men who ran the world, but who made it run.

at some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself.

Older men were better companions, they were seasoned lovers, they knew the world, they knew themselves. Unlike younger men, they held their emotions in balance. They had read more, seen more, they were warmer, kinder, less boastful, more tolerant, less violent. They were more interesting, they could choose the wine. They had more money.

but hearing and seeing only the bright hurry-gurdy carousel os his twirling thoughts, and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage! And what about Molly....?

Briony said reasonably, 'How can you hate plays?' 'It's just showing off.' Pierrot shrugged as he delivered this self-evident truth.

the softest, sweetest part of the Cold War, the only truly interesting part, the war of ideas.

Jer,u tome sigurno i jest stvar:bit ?e bolji lije?nik jer je ?itao književnost.Kakva sve duboka objašnjenja njegova preina?ena senzibilnost može iš?itati iz ljudske patnje,iz samouništavaju?e gluposti ili puke zle sre?e koja je ljude natjerala u bolest!Ro?enje,smrt i krhkost izme?u njih.Uspon i pad-to je lije?nikov posao,a to je i književnost.

We often tell ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked.

Come si erano conosciuti, e come mai due innamorati dell'era moderna si rivelano così timidi e ingenui? Pur reputandosi troppo evoluti per credere al destino, restava paradossale ai loro occhi il fatto che un incontro di quella portata potesse essersi verificato per caso, determinato da centinaia di contingenze e scelte indi significanti. L'eventualità che non succedesse affatto era un pensiero tanto terrificante quanto possibile.

His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation.

the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition.

No one's been in the kitchen since he left it. On the table are his cup, Theo's empty water bottle and, beside it, the remote control. It's stil faintly surprising, this fidelity of objects, sometimes reassuring, sometimes sinister.

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy.

I will return. I will find you. Love you. Marry you. And live without shame.

Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem.

she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ.

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 endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained.

other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.

Her wish for a harmonious, organized 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.