Quotes from Ian Mcewan

This time she paused to peer out of the window at the dusk and wonder where her sister was. Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motor car, she thought ritually, a sound principal being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.

La autopsia al final de una velada era uno de los rasgos de su vida conyugal.

He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.

Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque

But what troubled her was unutterable, and she could barely frame it for herself. Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness.

It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it.

Como pode uma escritora expiar os seus pecados se, com o poder absoluto de decidir o final, é em certa medida Deus? Não há ninguém, nenhuma entidade, nenhum ser superior a quem ela possa apelar, com quem possa reconciliar-se ou que possa perdoar-lhe.

Exhaustion made him vulnerable to the thoughts he wanted least.

If only she could, like the mother of Jesus, arrive at that swollen state by magic.

That naked childlike surrender, before she rose to assume an adult's armour, seemed first thing this morning like a essential from which she was banished.

What was in his day a vagina is now proudly a birth canal, my Panama, and I'm greater than he was, a stately ship of genes, dignified by unhurried progress, freighted with my cargo of ancient information.

From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.

Era stanca di stare all'aperto, ma non aveva voglia di rientrare. Tutta qui, la scelta che offriva la vita, star dentro o star fuori? Possibile che la gente non potesse andare anche altrove?

Se consideraban demasiado complejos para creer en el destino, pero les seguía pareciendo una paradoja que un encuentro tan trascendental hubiera sido fortuito, tan dependiente de cien sucesos y elecciones nimios. Qué posibilidad tan aterradora que pudiera no haberse producido nunca.

She listed some relevant ingredients, goals towards which a child might grow. Economic and moral freedom, virtue, compassion and altruism, satisfying work through engagement with demanding tasks, a flourishing network of personal relationships, earning the esteem of others, pursuing larger meanings to one's existence, and having at the centre of one's life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love.

So, getting closer, my idea was To be. Or if not that, its grammatical variant, is. This was my aboriginal notion and here's the crux – is. Just that. In the spirit of Es muss sein. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.

God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides.

Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head.

Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door.

desde el siglo XVI la base de la política inglesa y posteriormente británica en Europa fue la consecución del equilibrio de poder. Se me ordenó que leyera sobre el Congreso de Viena de 1815.Tony insistía en que un equilibrio entre naciones era el cimiento de un sistema jurídico internacional de diplomacia pacífica. Era vital que los países se controlasen mutuamente.

I experienced only the glow of an extraordinary reading experience, a form of profound gratitude familiar to all who love literature.

Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.

The abandonment was delicious. Something was pouring out of him, through his palm and into hers; something was spreading back up his arm, across his chest, constricting his throat. His only thought was a repetition: so this is it, it's like this, so this is it …

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or