Ian Mcewan
But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.Collection: Interesting
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.Collection: Views
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.Collection: Strong
I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.Collection: Waiting
I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.Collection: Book
She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.Collection: Real
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Sweet
Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.Collection: Reading
was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?Collection: Denial
What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.Collection: Spring
Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.Collection: Opportunity
We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.Collection: Men
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.Collection: Self
...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.Collection: Giving
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.Collection: Two
She bent her finger and then straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending... . And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind.Collection: Moving
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?Collection: Reading
For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.Collection: Nuts
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.Collection: Missing
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.Collection: Emotional
She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.Collection: Memories
But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.Collection: Sadness
No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.Collection: Squirrels
She loved him, though not at this particular moment.Collection: Love
Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.Collection: Order
How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.Collection: Atheist
Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.Collection: Taken
She lay in the dark and knew everything.Collection: Dark
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.Collection: Looks
In 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.Collection: Stress
Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.Collection: Ideas
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.Collection: Believe
I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.Collection: Father
Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.Collection: Children
In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.Collection: Art
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?Collection: Writing
When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.Collection: Diversion
I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.Collection: Strong
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.Collection: Thinking
I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.Collection: Thinking
Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.Collection: Simple
Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidenceCollection: Guilty
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.Collection: Writing
Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.Collection: Narrative
Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.Collection: Too Much
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.Collection: Love You
Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning.Collection: Lost
I've always thought cruelty is a failure of imagination.Collection: Imagination