Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we’re surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy.”

— Ian McEwan

152. “From where I am, you and my mother and the world are all one. Hyperbole, I know. The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it. And I love and admire you both. What I’m saying is, I’m fearful of rejection.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

154. “Her purity of spirit would never be in doubt, though she moved through a blemished world.”

— Ian McEwan

155. “Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust: her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.”

— Ian McEwan

156. “For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.”

— Ian McEwan

157. “He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father.”

— Ian McEwan

158. “This was still the era – it would end later in that famous decade – when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”

— Ian McEwan

159. “She was not in love, or out of love – she felt nothing. She just wanted to be here alone in the dusk against the bulk of her giant tree.”

— Ian McEwan

160. “Was he pretending to be jealous to conceal the fact that he was?”

— Ian McEwan

161. “Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?”

— Ian McEwan

162. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

163. “What is it precisely, that feeling of ‘returning’ from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger – then it fades, but never completely.”

— Ian McEwan

164. “Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

— Ian McEwan

165. “He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged.”

— Ian McEwan

166. “Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it’s okay to be a boy; for girls it’s like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.”

— Ian McEwan

167. “How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”

— Ian McEwan

168. “I saw the same joy, the same uncontrollable smile in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped Scottish granny and a pale correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their trolleys in and recognised a figure in the expectant crowd. Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.”

— Ian McEwan

169. “The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It’s the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.”

— Ian McEwan

170. “For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief – how could they ever be other than what they are?”

— Ian McEwan

171. “She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?”

— Ian McEwan

172. “No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.”

— Ian McEwan

173. “Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.”

— Ian McEwan

174. “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.”

— Ian McEwan

175. “Yes, her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight- this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist- a flight from her proper destiny. Her failure to become a woman, as her mother understood the term.”

— Ian McEwan

176. “It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.”

— Ian McEwan

177. “Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.”

— Ian McEwan

178. “I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness. To avoid serious damage a simple.”

— Ian McEwan

179. “Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem.”

— Ian McEwan

180. “As he pushed her by the shoulder toward the gate, the rising howl commenced. Nightmares had beome a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining toward the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally.”

— Ian McEwan

181. “There was something fascinating about tall thin men, the way their bones and Adam’s apple lurked so unconcealed beneath the skin, their birdlike faces, their predatory stoop.”

— Ian McEwan

182. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

183. “I’ve never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.”

— Ian McEwan

184. “Memory’s got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.”

— Ian McEwan

185. “The sound was so icy and bleak that he imagined his daughter had seen in her dreams the unavoidable future, all the sorrow and confusion to come, and he felt himself shrink in horror. But the moment passed, and soon Sebastian and Monica sank again, or they rose, for there seemed to be no physical dimensions in the space they swam or tumbled through, only sensation, only pleasure so focused, so pointed it was a reminder of pain.”

— Ian McEwan

186. “Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”

— Ian McEwan

187. “A man newly in love knows what life is.”

— Ian McEwan

188. “You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.”

— Ian McEwan

189. “Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.”

— Ian McEwan

190. “It’s the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.”

— Ian McEwan

191. “Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.”

— Ian McEwan

192. “She would have called after him but for the dread of being ignored.”

— Ian McEwan

193. “I wouldn’t mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band. However, I don’t play the guitar.”

— Ian McEwan

194. “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.”

— Ian McEwan

195. “Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.”

— Ian McEwan

196. “Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.”

— Ian McEwan

197. “By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.”

— Ian McEwan

198. “Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union.”

— Ian McEwan

199. “Only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards.”

— Ian McEwan

200. “In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.”

— Ian McEwan