Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “He speaks in a quiet, breathy tone, exaggeratedly slow. Where do we learn such tricks? Are they inscribed, along with the rest of our emotional repertoire? Or do we get them from the movies? He says, “Look, there’s this problem out there” – he gestures to the window – “and all I wanted from you was your support and help.”

— Ian McEwan

352. “He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves.”

— Ian McEwan

353. “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.”

— Ian McEwan

354. “Daringly, they touched the tips of their tongues, and it was then she made the falling, sighing sound which, he realised later, marked a transformation. Until that moment, there was still something ludicrious about having a familiar face so close to one’s own. They felt watched by their bemused childhood selves.”

— Ian McEwan

355. “His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”

— Ian McEwan

356. “How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures?”

— Ian McEwan

357. “This time she paused to peer out of the window at the dusk and wonder where her sister was. Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motor car, she thought ritually, a sound principal being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.”

— Ian McEwan

358. “No child is an island. She thought her responsibilities ended at the court room walls. But how could they? He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.”

— Ian McEwan

359. “El amor sufre luengo y es amable; el amor no envidia; el amor no se jacta, no es pomposo, no se comporta de una forma indecorosa, no busca su provecho, no se deja provocar, no medita maldades; se deleita no en la iniquidad, sino en la verdad...”

— Ian McEwan

360. “Is he about to become that man, that modern fool of a certain age, who finds himself pausing by shop windows to stare in at the saxophones or the motorbikes, or driven to find himself a mistress of his daughter’s age?”

— Ian McEwan

361. “He had never learned anything new at a meeting.”

— Ian McEwan

362. “She listed some relevant ingredients, goals towards which a child might grow. Economic and moral freedom, virtue, compassion and altruism, satisfying work through engagement with demanding tasks, a flourishing network of personal relationships, earning the esteem of others, pursuing larger meanings to one’s existence, and having at the centre of one’s life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love.”

— Ian McEwan

363. “A partir de cierta edad, un trayecto por la ciudad se vuelve ingratamente meditabundo. Las direcciones de los muertos se amontonan.”

— Ian McEwan

364. “The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it.”

— Ian McEwan

365. “Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, it’s among others that we have to live and their judgments matter.”

— Ian McEwan

366. “The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.”

— Ian McEwan

367. “She had returned from Cambridge with a vague notion that her family was owed an uninterrupted stretch of her company.”

— Ian McEwan

368. “La autopsia al final de una velada era uno de los rasgos de su vida conyugal.”

— Ian McEwan

369. “But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy’s attempts to educate him. Some nineteenth-century poet – Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure – touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life.”

— Ian McEwan

370. “The years slid over old deaths like a heavy lid. Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget. Should have kept a journal.”

— Ian McEwan

371. “Soon human meaning would be bleached from the rocks, the landscape would assume its beauty and draw him in; the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.”

— Ian McEwan

372. “He had reached that point – late thirties was common – when one’s parents set off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major’s car. Then larger parts came away and needed to be gathered or caught mid-air by their children. It was a slow process. Ten.”

— Ian McEwan

373. “Their friendship had become vague and even constrained in recent years, but it was still an old habit, and to break it now in order to become strangers on intimate terms required a clarity of purpose which had temporarily deserted them.”

— Ian McEwan

374. “These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel.”

— Ian McEwan

375. “The characters in this novel are inventions and bear no resemblance to people living or dead. Edward and Florence’s hotel – just over a mile south of Abbotsbury, Dorset, occupying an elevated position in a field behind the beach parking lot – does not exist.”

— Ian McEwan

376. “Here was a surprise, a love affair, an affair of love, as he entered his seventies.”

— Ian McEwan

377. “No one can predict which of life’s vexations insomnia will favour.”

— Ian McEwan

378. “They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now.”

— Ian McEwan

379. “My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we’re going to be at peace with each other, I’m not saying it’ll happen. There’s a good chance it won’t. I’m saying it’s our only chance.”

— Ian McEwan

380. “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

381. “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

382. “Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth.”

— Ian McEwan

383. “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

384. “These disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage.”

— Ian McEwan

385. “She could have phoned one of three friends, but she could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real.”

— Ian McEwan

386. “Surely, there was grandeur in experiment.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

388. “To kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain.”

— Ian McEwan

389. “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

390. “Exhaustion made him vulnerableto the thoughts he wanted least.”

— Ian McEwan

391. “God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides.”

— Ian McEwan

392. “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

393. “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

394. “He tilted back his chair and surveyed his desk as one might a life.”

— Ian McEwan

395. “He doesn’t trouble himself with closing the shutter – total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and to avoid thoughts at all costs.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

397. “A consignment bound for Peru, Argentina’s ally, was blocked. But other countries, including Iran, were willing to sell. There was also a black market. British agents, posing as arms dealers, bought up the supply.”

— Ian McEwan

398. “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

399. “A gated community of a historical sort, a fortress of barristers and judges who were also musicians, wine fanciers, would-be writers, fly fishermen and raconteurs. A nest of gossip and expertise, and a delightful garden still haunted by the reasonable spirit of Francis Bacon. She loved it here and never wanted to leave.”

— Ian McEwan

400. “I’d made a reckless decision, but I was encouraged by reports that Sir Alan Turing, war hero and presiding genius of the digital age, had taken delivery of the same model.”

— Ian McEwan