Ian McEwan citations

“Ce moment avait été imaginé et désiré depuis trop longtemps pour être à leur mesure.”

“A quel point la culpabilité raffinait-elle les façons de se torturer, enfilant les perles du détail en boucle sans fin, un chapelet à égrener pour la vie!”

“Au-delà d'un certain âge, traverser la ville donne désagréablement à penser. Les adresses des morts s'accumulent.”

“Elle murmura son nom avec la circonspection d'un enfant qui s'essaie à des sons distincts. Lorsqu'il énonça le sien en réponse, on aurait dit un mot nouveau - les syllabes restaient les mêmes, le sens était différent. Enfin, il prononça ces trois mots simples que nul art médiocre, nulle mauvaise foi ne réussiront jamais à déprécier tout à fait. Elle les répéta, avec exactement la même légère insistance sur le dernier mot, comme si elle était la première à les dire…”

“J'aurais dû traverser l'existence avec ce privilège que donne la beauté, de pouvoir prendre les hommes et les jeter. Au lieu de quoi c'étaient eux qui m'abandonnaient ou mouraient. Ou bien se mariaient.”

“Ils étaient au-delà du présent, en dehors du temps, sans souvenirs et sans futur. Il n'y avait plus qu'une sensation qui effaçait tout, excitante et envahissante, et le son de l'étoffe sur l'étoffe, de la peau sur l'étoffe, tandis que leurs membres se coulaient l'un par-dessus l'autre dans cette lutte sensuelle et sans relâche.”

“Vous n'avez tué personne aujourd'hui? Mais combien en avez-vous laissé mourir?”

“Ne jamais alimenter soi-même la polémique.”

“Rien de plus déraisonnable que de coucher avec la femme de son patron.”

“Un verbe conjugué au présent pour exposer une position de principe peut se transformer en constat.”

“Tout admettre, ne pas faire de choix, revient au même, à mon avis, que de ne croire en rien.”

“Lire et écrire sont des activités abstraites, mais uniquement dans la mesure où on peut dire que parler une langue est une activité abstraite.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.”

“come back, come back to me”

“He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.”

“How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”

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

“But whathappened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.”

“Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.”

“There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.”

“Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.”

“At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.”

“From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”