527 Quotes by Ian McEwan

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return.

But how to do feelings? All very well to write “She felt sad”, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.

It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.

Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.

I’ve never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.

Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking.

No one knows anything, really. It’s all rented, or borrowed.

Unlike in Daisy’s novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don’t remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.