Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “What must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence.”

— Ian McEwan

452. “I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn’t understand how profound I was.”

— Ian McEwan

453. “If I can’t get along with the father of my children, how can the world make progress?”

— Ian McEwan

454. “She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill.”

— Ian McEwan

455. “But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past – how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or.”

— Ian McEwan

456. “But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plough, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths.”

— Ian McEwan

457. “These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus.”

— Ian McEwan

458. “And there was something I’ve since noticed over the years – the mountain range that separates the naked from the clothed man. Two men on one passport.”

— Ian McEwan

459. “Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor’s voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe’s tragic poem.”

— Ian McEwan

460. “The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down.”

— Ian McEwan

461. “Lately I’ve noticed these mouths in some women of my age. A lifetime of putting out, as they saw it, and getting nothing back. The men were bastards, the social contract unjust, and biology itself an affliction.”

— Ian McEwan

462. “How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.”

— Ian McEwan

463. “He should take a different bank card to replace one that was out of date. Cars no longer had CD players, so he should look one out if he was to play her favourite disc.”

— Ian McEwan

464. “She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears.”

— Ian McEwan

465. “She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought.”

— Ian McEwan

466. “Her college years felt like freedom to her.”

— Ian McEwan

467. “Instead, she found her argument in the “doctrine of necessity,” an idea established in common law that in certain limited circumstances, which no parliament would ever care to define, it was permissible to break the criminal law to prevent a greater evil.”

— Ian McEwan

468. “The organ played a familiar introduction. Ever since his truculent fourth form at Berners Hall, he could not bring himself to sing a hymn. However sweet the melodies or the rhythm of the lines he could not get past the embarrassment of their blatant or childish untruths. But the point was not to believe but to join in, to be part of the community.”

— Ian McEwan

469. “Los relatos no se venden. Los editores suelen hacer estas colecciones como un favor a sus autores consagrados.”

— Ian McEwan

470. “She was one of those people who could not say if one note was lower or higher than another. This was no less a disability and misfortune than a clubfoot or a harelip...”

— Ian McEwan

471. “I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: If you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.”

— Ian McEwan

472. “The new, wellspring of all bad dreams. Driven by a self-harming compulsion, I listen closely to analysis and dissent.”

— Ian McEwan

473. “But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worried that what showed in my face was pity.”

— Ian McEwan

474. “Old Europa tosses in her dreams. She wants to help but she doesn’t want to share or lose what she has.”

— Ian McEwan

475. “I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.”

— Ian McEwan

476. “But there was only one inevtiable end, and there was nothing they could do but go towards it.”

— Ian McEwan

477. “Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else... It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.”

— Ian McEwan

478. “Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.”

— Ian McEwan

479. “And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born.”

— Ian McEwan

480. “If only she could, like the mother of Jesus, arrive at that swollen state by magic.”

— Ian McEwan

481. “I’m raising my glass to that love. May it never be denied, forgotten, distorted, or rejected as illusion. To our love. It happened. It was true.”

— Ian McEwan

482. “Their love would have space and a society to grow in.”

— Ian McEwan

483. “Then it came to her plainly what she felt about Jack’s return. So simple. It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.”

— Ian McEwan

484. “They had been married six years, a time of slow, fine adjustments to the jostling principles of physical pleasure, domestic duty, and the necessity of solitude. Neglect of one led to diminishment or chaos in the others.”

— Ian McEwan

485. “And these are only the ones I happen to know about. As soon as you discover you’re not the best, you throw it in and hate yourself. Same with relationships. You want too much and move on.”

— Ian McEwan

486. “To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small.”

— Ian McEwan

487. “Any five-year-old girl – though boys would do – gave substance to her continued.”

— Ian McEwan

488. “Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour.”

— Ian McEwan

489. “And this was to be his main point – there was one overriding reason for our failure, which was the lack of coordinated intelligence. Too many agencies, too many bureaucracies defending their corners, too many points of demarcation, insufficient centralized control.”

— Ian McEwan

490. “And if he had, he would not have been alarmed. A childless man of a certain age at the end of his fifth marriage could afford a touch of nihilism.”

— Ian McEwan

491. “The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.”

— Ian McEwan

492. “They would also need to talk sense to her. The almost-existing children, the husky-voiced daughter, a museum curator perhaps, and the gifted, less settled son, good at too many things, who failed to complete his university course, but a far better pianist than she. Both always affectionate, brilliant at Christmases and summer-holiday castles and entertaining their youngest relations.”

— Ian McEwan

493. “Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head.”

— Ian McEwan

494. “She was not in pain, not yet, but she was retreating before its threat.”

— Ian McEwan

495. “She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleadures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed with half a page a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word – a glance.”

— Ian McEwan

496. “She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby’s half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living.”

— Ian McEwan

497. “For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants.”

— Ian McEwan

498. “That naked childlike surrender, before she rose to assume an adult’s armour, seemed first thing this morning like a essential from which she was banished.”

— Ian McEwan

499. “Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.”

— Ian McEwan

500. “He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.”

— Ian McEwan