Ian McEwan quotes - page 2

Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame. (Ian McEwan)
She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore. View quote
Ian McEwan
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. View quote
Ian McEwan
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth. View quote
Ian McEwan
It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection. View quote
Ian McEwan
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten. View quote
Ian McEwan
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual. View quote
Ian McEwan
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time. View quote
Ian McEwan
Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily. View quote
Ian McEwan
Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality. View quote
Ian McEwan
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation. (Ian McEwan)
No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed. View quote
Ian McEwan
Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those. View quote
Ian McEwan
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die. View quote
Ian McEwan
Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a God. ... It's human, universal, [it's] being able to think our way into the minds of others. As I said at the time, what those holy fools clearly lacked, or clearly were able to deny themselves, was the ability to enter into the minds of the people they were being so cruel to. Amongst their crimes was a failure of the imagination, of the moral imagination. View quote
Ian McEwan
We went to a club where singers and stand-up comedians performed in the hope of being discovered. A thin girl with bright red hair and sequined T-shirt reached the end of her passionately murmured song on a sudden shrill, impossible top note. All conversation ceased. Someone, perhaps maliciously, dropped a glass. Halfway through, the note became a warbling vibrato and the singer collapsed on the stage in an abject curtsy, arms held stiffly in front of her, fists clenched. Then she sprang to her tiptoes and held her arms high above her head with the palms flat as if to forestall the sporadic and indifferent applause."They all want to be Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli," George explained as he sucked a giant cocktail through a pink plastic straw. "But no one's looking for that kind of stuff anymore." View quote
Ian McEwan
Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading. View quote
Ian McEwan
True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. View quote
Ian McEwan
When anything can happen, everything matters. View quote
Ian McEwan
You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other. View quote
Ian McEwan
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go. (Ian McEwan)
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken. View quote
Ian McEwan
But whathappened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. View quote
Ian McEwan
There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness. View quote
Ian McEwan
Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone. View quote
Ian McEwan