527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.

As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had beome a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally.

Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.

Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.

But here’s life’s most limiting truth - it’s always now, always here, never then and there.

Consent has rough edges.

Narrative Tension is primarily about witholding information.

…the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.

I, o Bože, voleo sam i ja nju. Bez obzira na to koliko sam mislio na Klarisu, u sećanju ili očekivanju, to što sam je doživeo ponovo, osetio i čuo, ona neosporna ljubav koja je strujala između nas, to zapravo životinjsko prisustvo, uvek bi me, mada poznato, uzdrmalo kao neočekivano.