527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

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.

Was 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.

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.

The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can’t see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the’ll neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won’t melt the ice in his heart.He must be ruthless!No religion, no purpose except this:Make something perfect before you die.Life is short, art is for all time

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.