Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

356. “Our desires permeate our perceptions.”

— Ian McEwan

357. “Some endeavours are doomed at their inception, not by cowardice bu by their very nature.”

— Ian McEwan

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

365. “The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

— Ian McEwan

366. “My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth.”

— Ian McEwan

367. “Their sister, who sat between them, with left leg balanced on right knee, was, by contrast, perfectly composed, having liberally applied perfume and changed into a green gingham frock to offset her colouring. Her sandals revealed an ankle bracelet and toenails painted vermilion. The sight of these nails gave Briony a constricting sensation around her sternum, and she knew at once that she could not ask Lola to play the prince.”

— Ian McEwan

368. “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

369. “Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out.”

— Ian McEwan

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

378. “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

379. “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

380. “Love just follows you.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

392. “It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it.”

— Ian McEwan

393. “He no longer cared much what others thought of him. There were few benefits in growing older, and this was one.”

— Ian McEwan

394. “As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.”

— Ian McEwan

395. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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