Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2024 Update)
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Ian McEwan Quote: “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. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth – Edward and Florence, free at last!”

401. “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. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a new pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth – Edward and Florence, free at last!”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head.”

402. “Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism – which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right – came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.”

403. “Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism – which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right – came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “It bore her no malice, this animal, it was indifferent to her misery. It would move as a cage panther might: because it is awake, out of boredom, for the sake of movement itself, or for no reason at all, and with no awareness.”

404. “It bore her no malice, this animal, it was indifferent to her misery. It would move as a cage panther might: because it is awake, out of boredom, for the sake of movement itself, or for no reason at all, and with no awareness.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn’t understand how profound I was.”

405. “I was pure and good. I loved it that they couldn’t understand how profound I was.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “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.”

406. “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 Quote: “Her college years felt like freedom to her.”

407. “Her college years felt like freedom to her.”

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

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

Ian McEwan Quote: “But there was only one inevtiable end, and there was nothing they could do but go towards it.”

409. “But there was only one inevtiable end, and there was nothing they could do but go towards it.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “At last he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much, that he had never found anyone, man or woman, who matched her seriousness.”

410. “At last he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much, that he had never found anyone, man or woman, who matched her seriousness.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else... It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.”

411. “Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else... It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “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.”

412. “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 Quote: “Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.”

413. “Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Love just follows you.”

414. “Love just follows you.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.”

415. “Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.”

416. “It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “The money to buy even the cheapest of these things had been earned by Clive dreaming up sounds, by putting one note in front of another. He had imagined everything here, he had willed it all to be here, without anyone’s help.”

417. “The money to buy even the cheapest of these things had been earned by Clive dreaming up sounds, by putting one note in front of another. He had imagined everything here, he had willed it all to be here, without anyone’s help.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Then it came to her plainly what she felt about Jack’s return. So simple. It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.”

418. “Then it came to her plainly what she felt about Jack’s return. So simple. It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “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.”

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

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

Ian McEwan Quote: “But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past – how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or.”

421. “But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past – how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Such a fantasy of miscegenation could be a form of racism or simple adoration, but either way he was in no mood to banish it.”

422. “Such a fantasy of miscegenation could be a form of racism or simple adoration, but either way he was in no mood to banish it.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plough, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths.”

423. “But first he must cover the miles again, and go back north to the field where the farmer and his dog still walked behind the plough, and ask the Flemish lady and her son if they held him accountable for their deaths.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.”

424. “His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “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.”

425. “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 Quote: “The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew – family, home, friends – writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.”

426. “The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew – family, home, friends – writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “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.”

427. “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 Quote: “Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door.”

428. “Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “But Clive stared at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.”

429. “But Clive stared at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He suspected he had brushed against a fundamental law of the universe: such ecstasy must compromise his freedom. That was its price.”

430. “He suspected he had brushed against a fundamental law of the universe: such ecstasy must compromise his freedom. That was its price.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears.”

431. “She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “It wasn’t hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters.”

432. “It wasn’t hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought.”

433. “She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.”

434. “I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby’s half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living.”

435. “She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby’s half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “What must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence.”

436. “What must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants.”

437. “For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.”

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

Ian McEwan Quote: “Why would the world configure itself so harshly?”

439. “Why would the world configure itself so harshly?”

Ian McEwan Quote: “She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill.”

440. “She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.”

441. “He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “Whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble, whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading.”

442. “Whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble, whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading.”

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

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

Ian McEwan Quote: “My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

444. “My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

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

445. “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 Quote: “The organ played a familiar introduction. Ever since his truculent fourth form at Berners Hall, he could not bring himself to sing a hymn. However sweet the melodies or the rhythm of the lines he could not get past the embarrassment of their blatant or childish untruths. But the point was not to believe but to join in, to be part of the community.”

446. “The organ played a familiar introduction. Ever since his truculent fourth form at Berners Hall, he could not bring himself to sing a hymn. However sweet the melodies or the rhythm of the lines he could not get past the embarrassment of their blatant or childish untruths. But the point was not to believe but to join in, to be part of the community.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “How would that constitute an ending? What service or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of the life I have remaining. I no longer possess the lavage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshall’s are dead, we will exist as my inventions.”

447. “How would that constitute an ending? What service or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of the life I have remaining. I no longer possess the lavage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshall’s are dead, we will exist as my inventions.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “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.”

448. “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 Quote: “But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.”

449. “But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall.”

Ian McEwan Quote: “But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worried that what showed in my face was pity.”

450. “But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worried that what showed in my face was pity.”

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