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Ian McEwan Quotes
115 Sourced Quotes
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The world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
Ian McEwan
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I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.
Ian McEwan
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Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Ian McEwan
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Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.
Ian McEwan
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Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
Ian McEwan
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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
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In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
Ian McEwan
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It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.
Ian McEwan
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And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
Ian McEwan
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One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.
Ian McEwan
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Mostly, we are good when it makes sense. A good society is one that makes sense of being good.
Ian McEwan
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On a recent Sunday evening, Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small."
Ian McEwan
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Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery.
Ian McEwan
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It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
Ian McEwan
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Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.
Ian McEwan
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When a court determines any question with respect to... the upbringing of a child... the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration.
Ian McEwan
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Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.
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It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.
Ian McEwan
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The lost child was everyone's property. But Stephen was alone.
Ian McEwan
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He never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.
Ian McEwan
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By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.
Ian McEwan
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There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Ian McEwan
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She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
Ian McEwan
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He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.
Ian McEwan
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I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.
Ian McEwan
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Ian McEwan
Creative Commons
Born:
June 21, 1948
(age 75)
Bio:
Ian Russell McEwan is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Known for:
Atonement (2001)
The Children Act (2014)
Nutshell (2016)
Sweet Tooth (2012)
On Chesil Beach (2007)
Most used words:
life
love
people
moment
felt
time
wanted
sense
years
simple
darkness
thought
human
self
child
Ian McEwan on Wikipedia
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