527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

Who you get, and how it works out- there’s so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back.

It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

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.

A man newly in love knows what life is.

The quiet gravity really wasn’t his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.

He needed that time edged with boredom in which fantasy could flourish.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past.

The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition.