Quotes from Ian Mcewan

She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real.

The truth is, we love each other, we've never stopped, we're obsessed. And we failed to do a thing with it. We couldn't make a life. We couldn't give up the love, but we wouldn't bend to its power.

football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.

She found his testicles first and, not at all afraid now, she curled her fingers softly around this extraordinary bristling item she had seen in different forms on dogs and horses, but had never quite believed could fit comfortably on adult humans.

He turned out the lamps and walked down to his bedroom. He had no preliminary sketch of an idea, not a scrap, not even a hunch, and he would not find it by sitting at the piano and frowning hard. It could come only in its own time. He knew from experience that the best he could do was relax, step back

Now human blubber draped his efforts.

They had been married six years, a time of slow, fine adjustments to the jostling principles of physical pleasure, domestic duty, and the necessity of solitude. Neglect of one led to diminishment or chaos in the others.

was listening out for him

Heller's Catch-18, Fitzgerald's The High-Bouncing Lover, Orwell's The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy's All's Well That Ends Well

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent—how the tilt of a skull could change a life!—Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from

She went slowly along Theobald's Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought.

Bitte keine magischen Zwergentrommler mehr', flehte er sie in einem Brief an, nachdem er seine Tirade abgelassen hatte. 'Keine Gespenster, Engel, Teufel oder Verwandlungen mehr. Wenn alles passieren kann, ist alles gleichgültig. Für mich ist das nichts als Kitsch.' / 'Du Dussel', tadelte sie ihn auf einer Postkarte, 'Du Erbsenzähler. Das ist Literatur, keine Physik!

Perowne sometimes wonders if, in his youth, he could ever have guessed that he would one day father a blues musician... But is there a lifetime's satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world... as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel... There's nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free.

She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleadures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed with half a page a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance.

Briony era una di quelle bambine possedute dal desiderio che al mondo fosse tutto assolutamente perfetto.

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent—how the tilt of a skull could change a life!—Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from the

following a line of thought without opposition. I was hardly the first to think it, but one could see the history of human self-regard as a series of demotions tending to extinction.

Beyaz gürültü: KulaÄŸa hoÅŸ gelen deniz dalgas?, yaÄŸmur, rüzgar sesi, radyo dalgas?, duÅŸ sesi gibi rahatlat?c? seslere verilen ad.

Now that Stephen had joined the throng he expected, with so much reading and talking and listening behind him, to be an expert, like everybody else. But it was as if he were trying to write afresh a book that had already been written. The ground was so well prepared, planted up with myth and cliché, and the tradition so firmly established, that he could no more think clearly about his own situation than a medieval painter could, by taking thought, invent perspective.

Our desires permeate our perceptions

Sans la foi, que le monde avait dû lui paraître grand ouvert, magnifique et terrifiant !

In my dreams, I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.

A consignment bound for Peru, Argentina's ally, was blocked. But other countries, including Iran, were willing to sell. There was also a black market. British agents, posing as arms dealers, bought up the supply.

Fresh-bearded young men with beautiful skin and long guns on Boulevard Voltaire gazing into the beautiful, disbelieving eyes of their own generation. It wasn't hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters. Long ago, someone pronounced groundless certainty a virtue.