Quotes by "Ian McEwan"

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.

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

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

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

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

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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. Self-exposure 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?

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.

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?

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

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

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

At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, 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.