Ian McEwan: Quotes about love

“In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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.”

Ian McEwan book Enduring Love

Source: Enduring Love

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

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

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

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“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.”

Ian McEwan book On Chesil Beach

Source: On Chesil Beach

“That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.”

Ian McEwan book On Chesil Beach

Source: On Chesil Beach

“Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.”

Ian McEwan book Sweet Tooth

Source: Sweet Tooth

“In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

“Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman's clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriétaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, 'Trois. Mari et deux frères,' as he set down their salads.This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”

Ian McEwan book Black Dogs

Page 164-165.
Black Dogs (1992)