Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

404. “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

405. “This sense of absence had been growing... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity... He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.”

— Ian McEwan

406. “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

407. “The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense.”

— Ian McEwan

408. “From beneath her, amplified by the stone arch, came the hiss of the breeze disturbing the sedge, and a sudden beating of wings against water which subsided abruptly. These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing – it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

410. “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

411. “Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

413. “If she went, what was he going to do with all these loving facts, these torturing details? If she wasn’t with him, how would he bear all this knowledge of her alone? The force of these considerations drove the words out of them, they came as easily as breath. “I love you,” he said.”

— Ian McEwan

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

420. “Now human blubber draped his efforts.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

422. “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

423. “Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

427. “Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

429. “Jokes against the legal profession were what the legal profession loved most.”

— Ian McEwan

430. “The brain’s fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre. Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

432. “This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago. Good decisions came less through rational calculation, more from sudden good moods. But so too did some of his worst decisions. But that was not for now.”

— Ian McEwan

433. “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

434. “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

435. “I made the enthusiast’s mistake of assuming that everyone shared my previous ignorance.”

— Ian McEwan

436. “It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realize that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.”

— Ian McEwan

437. “It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.”

— Ian McEwan

438. “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

439. “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

440. “Briony era una di quelle bambine possedute dal desiderio che al mondo fosse tutto assolutamente perfetto.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

442. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

444. “Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?”

— Ian McEwan

445. “She resented the way she was listening out for him, her attention poised, holding its breath, for the creak of the door or a floorboard. Wanting it, dreading it.”

— Ian McEwan

446. “He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.”

— Ian McEwan

447. “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

448. “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

449. “To love her was to be soothed.”

— Ian McEwan

450. “Get in first and shape the terms.”

— Ian McEwan