Ian McEwan citations

Page 2

“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.”

“Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.”

“If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.”

“The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.”

“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality”

“Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.”

“I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.”

“Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.”

“When anything can happen, everything matters.”

“… beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.”

“He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.”

“Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning…”

“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.”

“It is shaming sometimes how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?”

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

“one could drown in irrelevance.”

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

“A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken”

“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.”

“It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.”

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

“When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.”

“She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.”

“She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.”

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

“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.”

“The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.”

“We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth”

“Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.”

“However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.”