Ian McEwan: Trending quotes

“When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply a diversion.”

“It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”

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

“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”

“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”

“When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.”

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”

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

“It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”

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

“… falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.”

“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.”

“Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.”

“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”

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

“She lay in the dark and knew everything.”

“All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.”

“It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.”