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Life Quotes by Ian McEwan

45 Life quotes by Ian McEwan

All Life quotes Ian McEwan’s page

Ian McEwan writes about love that feels like a reason for living, a devotion that can lift a whole life. He also shows moments when life feels stuck or overwhelming, like a world full of billions of voices that make choices hard. The quotes touch on facing death, wanting a child, and deciding whether to stretch life longer.

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“...since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.”

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Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?

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“He had been walking these roads, he thought, all his life.”

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

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“How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?”

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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.

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“The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.”

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This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

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Someone once asked me "If your life could be extended to 150 and you could start another career, would you?" And I…

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“She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life,…

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He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life.…

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There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of…

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“I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible…

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“In Leon's life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed.…

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The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing…

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“He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope…

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“Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about…

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“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably…

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It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the…

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“Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man…

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“The evil I'm talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives, within a family, adn…

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“Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water…

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“This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social…

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“The light of artistic creation is also blinding. The artist can’t see the suffering he causes to those around him. And the’ll…

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“In a spirit of mutinous resistance, she climbed the steep grassy slope to the bridge, and qhen she stood on the driveway,…

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“That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster's cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them…

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“This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called…

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“It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling…

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“Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces. Their narrow subjects may confound or disappoint some. Courtship among…

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“Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck…

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

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“The novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life.”

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In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some…

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“Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water…

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If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be…

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It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to…

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I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can…

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“We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of…

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Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is…

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Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was…

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“As you will see, we do not believe that artists have an obligation to strike up attitudes to the war. Indeed, they are wise…

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

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.

“It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.”

“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling…

“Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening…

“Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or,…

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…

“On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have…

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

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 would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually…

“Words, as I'm beginning to appreciate, can make things true.”

I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in…

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it…