Quote

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Life
Taste
Reminds
Like
Streets
Teenage
Sweet
Longing
State
Hunger
Happiness
Distance
Seems
Air
States
Begin
Antiseptic
Years
General
Vaguely

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
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For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
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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.
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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?
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Not being boring is quite a challenge.
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Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
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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.
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Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.
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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.
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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.
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She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.
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...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
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Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.
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Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
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I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed.
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...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
Ian Mcewan
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Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
Ian Mcewan
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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.
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
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