Quotes from Ian Mcewan

En vecka senare, under måndagsmorgonen då hon skulle åka till nordöstra England, skedde en minimal rörelse längs den äktenskapliga förkastningssprickan, en rörelse som var nästan lika svår att upptäcka som kontinentalförskjutningen.

She was one of those people who could not say if one note was lower or higher than another. This was no less a disability and misfortune than a clubfoot or a harelip...

Isn't it the case that Jehovah's Witness patients are regularly treated now by what's called bloodless surgery? No transfusions are necessary. Allow me to quote to you from the American Journal of Otolaryngology: 'Bloodless surgery has come to represent good practice, and in the future it may well be the accepted standard of care.' 

Then it came to her plainly what she felt about Jack's return. So simple. It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.

Whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble, whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading.

But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy's attempts to educate him. Some nineteenth-century poet – Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure – touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life

Cuando te pregunté qué significaba estar enamorado, me dijiste que en sentido profundo, más allá del deseo, era un tierno interés por el bienestar de otra persona.

However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

He always had a paperback book, usually history, in his jacket pocket in case he found himself in a queue or a waiting room. He marked what he read with a pencil stub.

For one can assume too much sometimes, in fits of conceited self-blame.

The revolutionary lone inventor was a fantasy of popular culture – and the Minister

while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.

Her college years felt like freedom to her.

I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.

Stephen thought that if he could do everything with the intensity and abandonment with which he had once helped Kate build her castle, he would be a happy man of extraordinary powers.

He had never learned anything new at a meeting.

And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun.

The phrase was "in two places at once," and the memory was of early morning.

Rationalism is a blind faith.

Do you know when Jehovah's Witnesses were commanded to refuse blood transfusions?" "It's set down in Genesis. It dates from the Creation." "It dates from 1945, Mr. Henry. Before then it was perfectly acceptable.

my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I'll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown.

This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth - Edward and Florence, free at last!

Briony knew her only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter's dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps . . .

He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves.