Quotes from Ian Mcewan

she described in a separate paragraph the Haredi community, and how within it religious practice was a total way of life. The distinction between what was rendered to Caesar and what to God was meaningless, much as it was for observant Muslims.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually. So what's the use of

hung-over groan, the elective malady's melody.

But Cecilia, having learned modern forms of snobbery at Cambridge, considered a man with a degree in chemistry incomplete as a human being.

instructions

He doesn't trouble himself with closing the shutter - total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and to avoid thoughts at all costs.

His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.

How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures?

The new, wellspring of all bad dreams. Driven by a self-harming compulsion, I listen closely to analysis and dissent.

Any five-year-old girl – though boys would do – gave substance to her continued

Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We

These disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We've built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.

And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for something, a version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite old shoes.

Niente nella sua vita era sufficientemente interessante o scandaloso da meritare di essere tenuto segreto [...]

It's dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.

Se non vuoi fare il guastafeste devi unirti alla compagnia. Ma Peter non la pensava così. Non aveva niente in contrario a stare con gli altri quando era il caso. Ma la gente esagera. Anzi, secondo lui, se si fosse sprecato un po' meno tempo a stare insieme e a convincere gli altri a fare lo stesso, e se ne fosse dedicato un po'di più a stare da soli e pensare a chi siamo e chi potremmo essere, allora il mondo sarebbe stato un posto migliore, magari anche senza le guerre.

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Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.

Placed is but the lying cognate of dumped .

the) adjunct to a civilised existence.

Nel suo sguardo, c'è un mondo d'amore. Amo il mondo!

The world is also full of wonders, which is why I'm foolishly in love with it.

We're bound by the same rules that dog out pets. The great chain of non-being is round our necks too.

The novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life.