Quotes by Ian McEwan

When its gone, youll know what a gift love was. Youll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

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.

Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.

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.

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. Thats what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

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.

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

Theres 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.

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

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasnt really much else to do. Make something, and die.

He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.

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 readers. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

Wasnt 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.

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.

No one knows anything, really. Its all rented, or borrowed.

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?