Quotes from Ian Mcewan

Is he about to become that man, that modern fool of a certain age, who finds himself pausing by shop windows to stare in at the saxophones or the motorbikes, or driven to find himself a mistress of his daughter's age?

Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

No one exclaims at the moment of one's dazzling coming-out, It's a person! Instead: It's a girl, It's a boy. Pink or blue. Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time.

But Clive stared at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're

a sound principle being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.

I'll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true posession, my access to the only truth.

Where the human need for order meets the human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

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.

üks inimene, kes ootab teist, on nagu matemaatiline tehe, mil pole emotsioonidega mingit pistmist. Ootab. Üks inimene ei tee lihtsalt tükil ajal midagi, kuni teine kohale jõuab.

Sólo los niños, de hecho, piensan que un deseo y su cumplimiento es todo uno: quizás es lo que da a los tiranos ese aire infantil. Alargan la mano hacia lo que no poseen. Cuando topan con la frustración, la rabieta homicida nunca está muy lejos.

The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear. 4 In the third week after Alissa's disappearance Roland set about imposing order on the overstuffed bookshelves around the table just off the kitchen.

Either I've always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don't know what it means.

The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.

Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.

Even in the most richly communicative and reciprocal love affairs, it is nearly impossible to sustain that initial state of rapture beyond a few weeks.

This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow. It grieved her parents to see their first born Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne Without permission, to get ill and find indigence Until she was down to her last sixpence.

Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor's voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe's tragic poem.

Lo necesito. Tengo cincuenta y nueve años. Es mi último cartucho. Todavía no he visto pruebas de que exista otra vida después de ésta.

tooled cowboy boots, engraved hip flask and, in recognition of his new passion for geology, a nineteenth-century explorer's specimen hammer in a leather case. To bless his second adolescence on turning fifty, a trumpet that had once belonged to Guy Barker. These offerings represented only a fraction of the happiness she urged on him, and sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice.

He really believes that to write a poem in praise of my mother (her eyes, her hair, her lips) and come by to read it aloud will soften her, make him welcome in his own house.

It was exhilarating, at least at first, to live in a city of narcissists.

Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to

We'll always be troubled by how things are—that's how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.