Ian Mcewan
The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.Collection: Psychosis
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.Collection: Enduring Love
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.Collection: Feelings
He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.Collection: Self
This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.Collection: Sweet
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truthCollection: Hands
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.Collection: Dream
How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.Collection: Family Love
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.Collection: Hands
Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.Collection: Oblivion
Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.Collection: People
Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.Collection: Ideas
What is lawful is not always identical to what is right.Collection: Identical
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Religious
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spokenCollection: Stories
And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.Collection: Phones
Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.Collection: Leap
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.Collection: Foundation
The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.Collection: World
When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.Collection: Lost Love
This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight.Collection: Fall
It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?Collection: Lying
It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.Collection: Thinking
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.Collection: Simple
I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Girl
Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.Collection: Book
Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.Collection: Writing
Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?Collection: Matter
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.Collection: Dream
Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?Collection: Womanly
Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there.Collection: Not Sure
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Liars
I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.Collection: Intelligent
Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?Collection: Inevitable Death
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.Collection: Heart
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.Collection: Weather
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.Collection: Fate
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.Collection: Memories
But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill.Collection: Skills
Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.Collection: Thinking
In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.Collection: Mean
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Gratitude
It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning.Collection: Summer
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.Collection: Children