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Ian McEwan Quotes: 14

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

    Enduring Love

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

    Atonement

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

    On Chesil Beach

  • 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.

    Atonement

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

    Atonement

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

    Atonement

  • 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 elation--it 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.

    Atonement

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

  • He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

    Atonement

  • 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.

    Saturday

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

    Atonement

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

    Amsterdam

  • She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane 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?

    Atonement

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

    Sweet Tooth