Quotes from Ian Mcewan

As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.

She had returned from Cambridge with a vague notion that her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company.

Surely, there was grandeur in experiment.

Her cleverness, her love and knowledge of music, literature, her liveliness and charm when he was securely hers masked her desperation.

It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour, and even the precise manner in which they became lost expressed their cumulative choices, their will.

can't quite dispel the worthless notion that the very beautiful should live by other codes. For such a face as I've imagined for her there should be special respect.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

In our decline we live in the shadow of giants.

In fact, everyone he's passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill.

But there was only one inevtiable end, and there was nothing they could do but go towards it.

Instead, she found her argument in the "doctrine of necessity," an idea established in common law that in certain limited circumstances, which no parliament would ever care to define, it was permissible to break the criminal law to prevent a greater evil.

These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel.

contemplate

She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby's half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living.

Their sister, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed, having liberally applied perfume and changed into a green gingham frock to offset her colouring. Her sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of these nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she knew at once that she could not ask Lola to play the prince.

For love doesn't stand alone, nor can it, but trails like a blazing comet, bringing with it other shining goods—forgiveness, kindness, tolerance, fairness, companionability and friendship, all bound to the love which is at the heart of Jesus's message.

Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child.

Hiába csillogott oly tetszetÅ'sen az értelem, nem oldott meg semmit.

Love stories like Jane Austen's used to conclude chastely with preparations for a wedding. Now their climax lay on the far side of carnal knowledge, where all of complexity waited.

property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb.

I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf.

didn't use, and hadn't even heard, the word "totalitarianism." I probably would have thought it had something to do with refusing a drink.