527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing – it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.

I’m quite good at not writing.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.

God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger – then it fades, but never completely.

Past a certain age, men froze into place; they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were.

I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I’ll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.

I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee.