Quotes from Ian Mcewan

approached as millions before me had approached a famous presence in a public place, with outward humility masking the entitlement that genuine admiration confers.

Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else... It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.

As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.

When it comes to being reasonable, they rather go over the top.

So what's the use of a headache, a heartache? What am I being warned against, or told what to do? Don't let your incestuous uncle and mother poison your father. Don't waste your precious days idle and inverted. Get born and act!

part of a daydream's enticement was the illusion that she was helpless before its logic

I'll wait for you. Come back. She meant it. Time would show she really meant it.

El amor sufre luengo y es amable; el amor no envidia; el amor no se jacta, no es pomposo, no se comporta de una forma indecorosa, no busca su provecho, no se deja provocar, no medita maldades; se deleita no en la iniquidad, sino en la verdad...

forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?

I write from life. But the reader, you know, imports the symbols, the associations. I can't keep them out. That's how poetry works.

Teddy Bear' by Elvis Presley, I can remember, I have always been able to remember

In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he had always thought there would be time.

he went back upstairs to stare at himself in the bathroom mirror. Who was he? Captain of the second fifteen? An abject housebound halfwit in his pyjamas? He didn't know.

Celor ce nu-È™i pot lua gândul de la o nedreptate li se întâmpl? uneori s? suprapun?, în minte, dorinÈ›a de revan?? cu sentimentul unei obligaÈ›ii morale.

It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realize that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time

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.

I made the enthusiast's mistake of assuming that everyone shared my previous ignorance.

Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air.

Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.

Vous n'avez tué personne aujourd'hui ? Mais combien en avez-vous laissé mourir ?

A gated community of a historical sort, a fortress of barristers and judges who were also musicians, wine fanciers, would-be writers, fly fishermen and raconteurs. A nest of gossip and expertise, and a delightful garden still haunted by the reasonable spirit of Francis Bacon. She loved it here and never wanted to leave.

A quel point la culpabilité raffinait-elle les façons de se torturer, enfilant les perles du détail en boucle sans fin, un chapelet à égrener pour la vie !

He speaks in a quiet, breathy tone, exaggeratedly slow. Where do we learn such tricks? Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies? He says, "Look, there's this problem out there"—he gestures to the window—"and all I wanted from you was your support and help.