Quote

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

Ian Mcewan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Break
Atonement
Else
Torn
Persons
Novelists
Person
Vulnerable
Thing
Easily
People
Material
Mending
Materials
Mended
Among
Repairing

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

Image
I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.
Ian Mcewan
Image
You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
Ian Mcewan
Image
In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.
Ian Mcewan
Image
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.
Ian Mcewan
Image
She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.
Ian Mcewan
Image
London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who had started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.
Ian Mcewan
Image
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?
Ian Mcewan
Image
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.
Ian Mcewan
Image
From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
Ian Mcewan
Image
It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.
Ian Mcewan
Image
But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
Ian Mcewan
Image
All this happiness on display is suspect... If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.
Ian Mcewan
Image
That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.
Ian Mcewan