Quotes from Ian Mcewan

He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

Reading was my way of not thinking about maths. More than that (or do I mean less?), it was my way of not thinking.

The brain's fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun 'while the fucking priest wasn't looking. Thank God for the Dutch!

This is what he disliked about political people – injustice and calamity animated them, it was their milk, their lifeblood, it pleasured them.

Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end.

This was insomniac memory, not a dream. Frowning with concern, she took his free hand in hers and began to lead him across the room.

Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I'm lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it's for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.

In one lifetime it wouldn't be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it's familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. He supects there's something numbed or deficient or timid in himself (...) [M]ight look like virtue or doggedness, but it's neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he has to have: possession, belonging, repetition.

From the first sentence, we come into a presence, and we can see for ourselves the quality of a particular mind; in a matter of minutes we may read the fruits of a long-forgotten afternoon, an afternoon's work done in isolation, 150 years ago. And what was once an unfolding personal secret is now ours.

There was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis...

He walked across the land until he fell in the ocean

The organ played a familiar introduction. Ever since his truculent fourth form at Berners Hall, he could not bring himself to sing a hymn. However sweet the melodies or the rhythm of the lines he could not get past the embarrassment of their blatant or childish untruths. But the point was not to believe but to join in, to be part of the community.

Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There's intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks.

If she went, what was he going to do with all these loving facts, these torturing details? If she wasn't with him, how would he bear all this knowledge of her alone? The force of these considerations drove the words out of them, they came as easily as breath. I love you, he said.

The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.

This is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life then death. It's a foretaste.

They both knew the vitality of the unsaid, whose invisible spirits danced around them now.

Life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It's more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly's eye, reflecting, distorting and constructing our world at different focal lengths.

We're family. We raise our glasses. Cheers!

It was a chilly sensation, growing up.

He had reached that point—late thirties was common—when one's parents set off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major's car. Then larger parts came away and needed to be gathered or caught mid-air by their children. It was a slow process. Ten

Regarding yourself as a highly rational and compassionate being does not make you rational and compassionate in all circumstances.

In the Autumn of the twentieth century, it came about at last, the first step towards the fulfilment of an ancient dream, the beginning of the long lesson we would teach ourselves that however complicated we were, however faulty and difficult to describe in even our simplest actions and mode of being, we could be imitated and bettered.