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Absolute power Quote by Ian Mcewan

“How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?” quote by Ian Mcewan — Download Open image

“How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?”

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Absolute power Achieve Atonement Novelists Outcomes

More by Ian Mcewan

“As you will see, we do not believe that artists have an obligation to strike up attitudes to the war. Indeed, they are wise and right to ignore it and devote themselves to other subjects. Since artists are politically impotent, they must use this time to develop at deeper emotional levels. Your work, your war work, is to cultivate your…

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

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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 life.

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

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

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“Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Phillip Larkin the way she did. 'If I were to construct a religion/ I should make use of water.' She said she liked the laconic…

“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, as daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a…

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…

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“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…

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

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I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play…

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I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.

Explore all 496 Ian Mcewan quotes

More Absolute power quotes

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority,…

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

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Anarchy is the stepping stone to absolute power.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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“As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as under the dominance of these wants he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world. [T]hat is, indeed, only of man considered as Christian; for Christianity, in contradiction with the genuine…

Ludwig Feuerbach

Sometimes we like to think if we had power, that we would be different, and we would be omnipotent, but the truth is absolute…

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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual. Reality always creeps…

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A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed…

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Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

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The Book of Job is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of nature. Leviathan is advice on how to…

Donald Phillip Verene

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God cannot approve of a system of servitude, in which the master is guilty of assuming absolute power - of assuming God's place and…

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“With absolute power, corruption and evil seep in humanity, and that evil continues to flourish as the good of humankind lies idle in darkness,…

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If you are an eighteen or nineteen-year-old with little education, as is often the case, and you're put in charge of many, many people…

Yaroslav Trofimov

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“As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is…

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