Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.”

— Ian McEwan

452. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

454. “It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this.”

— Ian McEwan

455. “From beneath her, amplified by the stone arch, came the hiss of the breeze disturbing the sedge, and a sudden beating of wings against water which subsided abruptly. These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing – it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.”

— Ian McEwan

456. “This sense of absence had been growing... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity... He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.”

— Ian McEwan

457. “It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.”

— Ian McEwan

458. “Get in first and shape the terms.”

— Ian McEwan

459. “In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he had always thought there would be time.”

— Ian McEwan

460. “Arguing with the person you love is its own peculiar torment. The self divides against itself. Love slugs it out with its Freudian opposite. And if death wins and love dies, who gives a damn? You do, which enrages you and makes you more reckless yet. There’s intrinsic exhaustion too. Both know, or think they know, that a reconciliation must happen, though it could take days, even weeks.”

— Ian McEwan

461. “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

462. “If she went, what was he going to do with all these loving facts, these torturing details? If she wasn’t with him, how would he bear all this knowledge of her alone? The force of these considerations drove the words out of them, they came as easily as breath. “I love you,” he said.”

— Ian McEwan

463. “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

464. “He always had a paperback book, usually history, in his jacket pocket in case he found himself in a queue or a waiting room. He marked what he read with a pencil stub.”

— Ian McEwan

465. “Briony era una di quelle bambine possedute dal desiderio che al mondo fosse tutto assolutamente perfetto.”

— Ian McEwan

466. “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

467. “The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

470. “She resented the way she was listening out for him, her attention poised, holding its breath, for the creak of the door or a floorboard. Wanting it, dreading it.”

— Ian McEwan

471. “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

472. “He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.”

— Ian McEwan

473. “Rationalism is a blind faith.”

— Ian McEwan

474. “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

475. “To step down there now as if completely free, to be released from the arduous states of play of psychological condition, to have leisure to be open and attentive to perception, to the world whose breathtaking, incessant cascade against the senses was so easily and habitually ignored, dinned out, in the interests of unexamined ideals of personal responsibility, efficiency, citizenship, to step down there now, just walk away, melt into the shadow, would be so very easy.”

— Ian McEwan

476. “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

477. “No one exclaims at the moment of one’s dazzling coming-out, It’s a person! Instead: It’s a girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue. Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time.”

— Ian McEwan

478. “The phrase was “in two places at once,” and the memory was of early morning.”

— Ian McEwan

479. “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

480. “It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realize that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.”

— Ian McEwan

481. “There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought.”

— Ian McEwan

482. “Now human blubber draped his efforts.”

— Ian McEwan

483. “In those first moments it was easier to conceal a confusion of feeling behind a motherly tone.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

485. “Our desires permeate our perceptions.”

— Ian McEwan

486. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

488. “One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out.”

— Ian McEwan

489. “The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear. 4 In the third week after Alissa’s disappearance Roland set about imposing order on the overstuffed bookshelves around the table just off the kitchen.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

491. “Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

493. “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

494. “The reason he wouldn’t be drawn into political or even theological debate was that he was indifferent to other people’s opinions and felt no urge to engage with or oppose them.”

— Ian McEwan

495. “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

496. “He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.”

— Ian McEwan

497. “Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque.”

— Ian McEwan

498. “The sound of crickets, the feel of warm dried grass on the soles of his feet and the scent of baked earth pleased him. The big thick glass was icy in his hands. When he set it down, the tinkle of the ice cubes sounded personal.”

— Ian McEwan

499. “If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”

— Ian McEwan

500. “It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.”

— Ian McEwan