Quotes from Ian Mcewan

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme.

He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one.

The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don't think I can blame the heat.

These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus.

I was a born empiricist. I believed that writers were paid to pretend, and where appropriate should make use of the real world, the one we all shared, to give plausibility to whatever they had made up.

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. As with words, so with sentences.

Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.

Daringly, they touched the tips of their tongues, and it was then she made the falling, sighing sound which, he realised later, marked a transformation. Until that moment, there was still something ludicrious about having a familiar face so close to one's own. They felt watched by their bemused childhood selves.

Childhoods shine through adult skins, helpfully or not.

isn't rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all that it entails—jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realisable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next. Rather shop than pray.

the affair could have been over in minutes. It troubled him to discover that she was one of those women who can only love a man in need of rescue.

year-old girl. It was more than a habit, for a habit could be broken. This was a deep disposition, the outline experience had stencilled on character. It was not

Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out.

No one can predict which of life's vexations insomnia will favour.

surroundings embarrass him. Visits from his children seem to precipitate nasty scenes and so, by degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives. Easier too to attend weekly church services

My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're going to be at peace with each other, I'm not saying it'll happen. There's a good chance it won't. I'm saying it's our only chance.

Loud people, especially loud women, always attract enemies. It may have helped her, not to have been so threateningly beautiful...She actually told us that the word we must use of her was willowy. And then she laughed.

I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn't understand how profound I was.

Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union.

There's nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he's denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs.

She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears.

This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity...He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.

The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.