Quotes of Ian McEwan - somelinesforyou

“ When it’s gone, you’ll know what a gift love was. You’ll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. ”

- Ian McEwan Atonement

“ When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elationit might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth ”

- 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. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die. ”

- 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. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy. ”

- 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. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination? ”

- Ian McEwan

“ At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Selfexposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? ”

- Ian McEwan

“ The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are? ”

- Ian McEwan

“ Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. Solar ”

- Ian McEwan

“ No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself uptodate, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watchful for his own name. He saw it as if in bold. It could leap out at him from an unread double page of small print, and sometimes he could sense it coming before the page turn. ”

- Ian McEwan

“ She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at homeJane 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? ”

- Ian McEwan

“ She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at homeJane 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? ”

- Ian McEwan

“ She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at homeJane 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? ”

- Ian McEwan

“ It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important. ”

- Ian McEwan
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