Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out.

— Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan Quotes

He had never learned anything new at a meeting.

— Ian McEwan

Do you know when Jehovah’s Witnesses were commanded to refuse blood transfusions?” “It’s set down in Genesis. It dates from the Creation.” “It dates from 1945, Mr. Henry. Before then it was perfectly acceptable.

— Ian McEwan

This was still the era – it would end later in that famous decade – when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth – Edward and Florence, free at last!

— Ian McEwan

He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves.

— 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.

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

Exhaustion made him vulnerableto the thoughts he wanted least.

— Ian McEwan

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.

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

She had a knack or weakness for laughing boisterously at her own anecdotes – not, I thought, because she found herself funny, but because she thought that life needed celebrating and wanted others to join in.

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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.

— Ian McEwan

To mark R-Day we’ll mint a commemorative ten-pound coin. My idea is for a mirror image of a clock.

— Ian McEwan

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?

— Ian McEwan

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.

— Ian McEwan

How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.

— Ian McEwan

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.

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan
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