Quote

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Dream
Oblivious
Littles
Daydreaming
Little
Seemed
Always
Worse
Cost
Return
Moment
Moments
Realignment

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You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.
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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.
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He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.
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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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The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.
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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.
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Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?
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What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?
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If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
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Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.
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Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
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It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
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I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.
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At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
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There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
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But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill.
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Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
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