Quote

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

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
Thing
Learned
Torn
Always
Knew
Intimate
Known
Easily
Simple
Obvious
Everyone
Material
Else
Materials
Persons
Perspective
Mended
Person
Among
Atonement

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

Image
I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I would rather be physically disabled obviously than mentally. I would rather be paraplegic than nuts. And it is a terrifying prospect and actually the longer we live the more likely it is that that's how we will go and that's a very painful thing to contemplate.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.
Ian Mcewan
Image
When people ask, Is there any advice you'd give a young writer?, I say write short stories. They afford lots of failure. Pastiche is a great way to start.
Ian Mcewan
Image
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
Ian Mcewan
Image
It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.
Ian Mcewan
Image
For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I read in announcements of deaths 'peacefully in his sleep' and I wonder how many of those are true. Maybe they are just conventional. I hope they are true whenever I read it of someone. [But] I would rather be awake. Peacefully awake, brim full of some calming drug that was seeing me out of the door, having said my farewells.
Ian Mcewan
Image
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.
Ian Mcewan
Image
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
Ian Mcewan
Image
i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Not being boring is quite a challenge.
Ian Mcewan
Image
And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.
Ian Mcewan
Image
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
Ian Mcewan
Image
I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.
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
Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.
Ian Mcewan
Image
Cecilia wondered, as she sometimes did when she met a man for the first time, if this was the one she was going to marry, and whether it was this particular moment she would remember for the rest of her life - with gratitude, or profound and particular regret.
Ian Mcewan