Quotes from Ian Mcewan

It was the reason he had survived. It was the ordinary way of saying she would refuse all other men. Only you. Come back.

In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.

These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future

Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.

Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.

Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, [Briony] 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.

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

But of course, it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky

This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.

Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife.

But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill....

It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me