Top 500 Ian McEwan Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “How liberating to discover in the modern age that he, a city-dweller, an indoors man who lived by the keyboard and screen, could be tracked and ravaged and be an entire meal, a source of nourishment to others.”

— Ian McEwan

402. “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

403. “Now human blubber draped his efforts.”

— Ian McEwan

404. “If only she could, like the mother of Jesus, arrive at that swollen state by magic.”

— Ian McEwan

405. “Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.”

— Ian McEwan

406. “If I can’t get along with the father of my children, how can the world make progress?”

— Ian McEwan

407. “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

408. “Any five-year-old girl – though boys would do – gave substance to her continued.”

— Ian McEwan

409. “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

410. “Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour.”

— Ian McEwan

411. “And there was something I’ve since noticed over the years – the mountain range that separates the naked from the clothed man. Two men on one passport.”

— Ian McEwan

412. “The reason he wouldn’t be drawn into political or even theological debate was that he was indifferent to other people’s opinions and felt no urge to engage with or oppose them.”

— Ian McEwan

413. “Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor’s voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe’s tragic poem.”

— Ian McEwan

414. “He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.”

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

416. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

419. “She was not in pain, not yet, but she was retreating before its threat.”

— Ian McEwan

420. “To love her was to be soothed.”

— Ian McEwan

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

429. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

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

— Ian McEwan

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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