Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they’re innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.”

— Ian McEwan

102. “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

103. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

104. “It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.”

— Ian McEwan

105. “The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return.”

— Ian McEwan

106. “I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.”

— Ian McEwan

107. “When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.”

— Ian McEwan

108. “Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.”

— Ian McEwan

109. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

110. “She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations.”

— Ian McEwan

111. “He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.”

— Ian McEwan

112. “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

113. “Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.”

— Ian McEwan

114. “A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he’s absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it’s possible he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.”

— Ian McEwan

115. “Be wary of too much calm, particularly in your mid-fifties.”

— Ian McEwan

116. “It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in – but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.”

— Ian McEwan

117. “All day we’ve witnessed each other’s crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?”

— Ian McEwan

118. “But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill...”

— Ian McEwan

119. “It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.”

— Ian McEwan

120. “Ci si misura rapportandosi agli altri, non esiste alternativa. Di quando in quando, in modo assolutamente involontario, arriva qualcuno e ti insegna qualcosa sul tuo conto.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

122. “How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.”

— Ian McEwan

123. “The best way to tell people about climate change is through non-fiction. There’s a vast literature of outstanding writing on the subject.”

— Ian McEwan

124. “When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past.”

— Ian McEwan

125. “The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within 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. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained.”

— Ian McEwan

126. “I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.”

— Ian McEwan

127. “When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. 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. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.”

— Ian McEwan

128. “It was always the view of my parents,” Emily said, “that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.”

— Ian McEwan

129. “In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

131. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

132. “I don’t believe there’s any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.”

— Ian McEwan

133. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

134. “To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future.”

— Ian McEwan

135. “She turned her face into the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost, when there was no witness to her sorrow.”

— Ian McEwan

136. “Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict – what to give to others, and what to keep for yourself.”

— Ian McEwan

137. “He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.”

— Ian McEwan

138. “What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.”

— Ian McEwan

139. “The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.”

— Ian McEwan

140. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

141. “The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella – and was necessary to it.”

— Ian McEwan

142. “On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back.”

— Ian McEwan

143. “But here’s life’s most limiting truth – it’s always now, always here, never then and there. And.”

— Ian McEwan

144. “Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies.”

— Ian McEwan

145. “I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.”

— Ian McEwan

146. “At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.”

— Ian McEwan

147. “Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.”

— Ian McEwan

148. “The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.”

— Ian McEwan

149. “Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.”

— Ian McEwan

150. “When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.”

— Ian McEwan