Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “But what troubled her was unutterable, and she could barely frame it for herself. Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness.”

— Ian McEwan

352. “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

353. “In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.”

— 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. “Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child.”

— Ian McEwan

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

370. “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

371. “Our desires permeate our perceptions.”

— Ian McEwan

372. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

377. “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

378. “Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.”

— Ian McEwan

379. “Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces.”

— Ian McEwan

380. “It was still a novel and vertiginous experience for them to look for a minute on end into the eyes of another adult, without embarrassment or restraint.”

— Ian McEwan

381. “In fact, everyone he’s passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But 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

382. “His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover.”

— Ian McEwan

383. “Her cleverness, her love and knowledge of music, literature, her liveliness and charm when he was securely hers masked her desperation.”

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

— Ian McEwan

387. “Stephen thought that if he could do everything with the intensity and abandonment with which he had once helped Kate build her castle, he would be a happy man of extraordinary powers.”

— Ian McEwan

388. “All day long, she realized, she had been feeling strange, and seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp.”

— Ian McEwan

389. “For love doesn’t stand alone, nor can it, but trails like a blazing comet, bringing with it other shining goods – forgiveness, kindness, tolerance, fairness, companionability and friendship, all bound to the love which is at the heart of Jesus’s message.”

— Ian McEwan

390. “Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring.”

— Ian McEwan

391. “See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it’s because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you’ll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness.”

— Ian McEwan

392. “To mark R-Day we’ll mint a commemorative ten-pound coin. My idea is for a mirror image of a clock.”

— Ian McEwan

393. “Wasted time in beautiful places, lingering joyfully just inside the gates of paradise with the world’s colours aflame, always regretting the setting sun and the call home, the Edenic expulsion into the next day and its usual concerns.”

— Ian McEwan

394. “Love just follows you.”

— Ian McEwan

395. “This sense of absence had been growing since Molly’s funeral. It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.”

— Ian McEwan

396. “There’s nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he’s denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs.”

— Ian McEwan

397. “Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed.”

— Ian McEwan

398. “Fresh-bearded young men with beautiful skin and long guns on Boulevard Voltaire gazing into the beautiful, disbelieving eyes of their own generation. It wasn’t hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters. Long ago, someone pronounced groundless certainty a virtue.”

— Ian McEwan

399. “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

400. “I’ll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true posession, my access to the only truth.”

— Ian McEwan