527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

She thought of Robbie at dinner when there had been something manic and glazed in his look. Might he be smoking the reefers she had read about in a magazine, these cigarettes that drove young men of bohemian inclination across the borders of insanity?

The 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.

At times this biography made him comfortably nostalgic for a verdant, horse-drawn, affectionate England; at others he was faintly depressed by the way a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages – bottled, like homemade chutney. And by how easily an existence, its ambitions, networks of family and friend, all its cherished stuff, solidly possessed, could so entirely vanish.

We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth.

Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

One has to have the courage of one’s pessimism.

It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in – but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.

But of course, it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky.

Factory settings – a contemporary synonym for fate.