Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper.
In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.
The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.
He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.
He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.
It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed.
And anyway, who’s to say that what we see when we’re drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria.
Lots of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it.
A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads.
Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return.
I marvelled, not for the first time, at the cruel complacency of ordinary things. But no, not cruel, not complacent, only indifferent, as how could they be otherwise? Henceforth, I would have to address things as they are, not as I imagine them, for this was a new version of reality.
Yes, tings endure while the living lapse.
We do not grow up; all we do is grow dull.
Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one’s feet.
There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it.
What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark.
His years as a policeman had taught him to be not fearless, only to disregard the fact of being afraid.
How strange a thing it was to be here, animate and conscious, on this ball of mud and brine as it whirled through the illimitable depths of space.
I cut him off at once, with that particular form of corrosive savagery that grown sons reserve for their bumbling fathers.
I’m a priest for Christ’s sake – how can this be happening to me?