The best Quotes by Ian McEwan

Love wasn't possible without a self, and nor was thinking.

As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you're not free to choose your desires.

Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there's enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it's our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages. We live alongside this torment and aren't amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.

Factory settings - a contemporary synonym for fate.

From a certain point of view, the only solution to suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.

A man newly in love knows what life is.

Natürlich kommt es immer auf die Wahrheit an. Was wollt ihr denn für eine Welt? Eine, in der Rache herrscht oder Recht? Die Wahl ist einfach.

When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.

No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.

Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.

He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now.

It was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.

They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny, but still, it remained a paradox to them that so momentous a meeting should be accidental, so dependent on a hundred minor events and choices. What a terrifying possibility, that it might never have happened at all.

It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.

All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.

I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.

When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.

It was always the view of my parents that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.

It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.