01c. 1948 ADI was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!Ian McEwan / quote ↗
02c. 1948 ADThe Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
03c. 1948 AD…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
04c. 1948 ADYou can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
05c. 1948 ADBoth men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
06c. 1948 ADHe wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
07c. 1948 ADThere's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
08c. 1948 ADMemory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
09c. 1948 ADWas everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
11c. 1948 ADHe came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
12c. 1948 ADPerhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
14c. 1948 ADThere 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 / quote ↗
15c. 1948 ADIt troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
16c. 1948 ADIn a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
17c. 1948 ADIn 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1948 ADShe knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
19c. 1948 ADThe library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future,Ian McEwan / quote ↗
20c. 1948 ADIn difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
21c. 1948 AD...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
22c. 1948 ADWhere the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
24c. 1948 ADIt wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.Ian McEwan / quote ↗
