Quotes from Enduring Love

“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.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Who you get, and how it works out- there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“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, quote from Enduring Love

“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, quote from Enduring Love

“Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view. ”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“I squeezed her hand and said nothing. I knew little about Keats or his poetry, but I thought it possible that in his hopeless situation he would not have wanted to write precisely because he loved her so much. Lately I'd had the idea that Clarissa's interest in these hypothetical letters had something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect. In the months after we'd met, and before we'd bought the apartment, she had written me some beauties, passionately abstract in the ways our love was different from and superior to any that had ever existed. Perhaps that's the essence of a love letter, to celebrate the unique. I had tried to match her, but all that sincerity would permit me were the facts, and they seemed miraculous enough to me: a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“As we walked back to the car, Johnny said, "A tree's one thing, but it's a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically, you're giving them permission to kill you.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“How do you feel?'
Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.'
But you don't look it.'
I feel I'm shivering inside.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, ‘foreplay’. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me which I didn’t say out loud because they sounded so banal - Here we are, or, This again or Yes, this. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again. When we fell silent, we would lie so close we were mouth to mouth, delaying the union which bound us all the more because of this prelude.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“... her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Say it again slowly, that thing about the river.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“God's love may take the form of wrath. It can show itself to us as a calamity. This is the difficult lesson its taken me a lifetime to learn.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Even a trashy movie can make you cry. There were deep emotional reactions that ducked the censure of the higher reasoning processes and forced us to enact, however vestigially, our roles - me, the indignant secret lover revealed; Clarissa the woman cruelly betrayed.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict - what to give to others, and what to keep for yourself.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“I saw the same joy, the same uncontrollable smile in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped Scottish granny and a pale correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their trolleys in and recognised a figure in the expectant crowd. Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“We often tell ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“.. From there we came to love. We told each other what lovers never tire of hearing and needing to say.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Weit hinten in irgend einer Nasenhöhle hatte der Zufall aus Schleim eine zweistimmige Panflöte geformt, der wir gezwungen waren zu lauschen.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

“Ich bin noch immer nicht diesem Gefühl des leisen Stolzes, dem Gefühl der Anerkennung entwachsen, das sich einstellt, wenn Kinder einen bei der Hand nehmen.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Enduring Love

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Popular quotes

“Let's get it over with, so I can stop wondering. How many have there been?"
Lauren stared at him."How many what?"
"Lovers," he clarified bitterly.
She could hardly believe her ears. After treating her as if her standards of morality were childish, after acting as if promiscuity was a virtue, after telling her how man preferred experienced women, he was jealous. Because now he cared.
Lauren didn't know whether to hit him, burst out laughing or hug him. Instead she decided to exact just a tiny bit of revenge for all the misery and uncertainty he had put her through. Turning,she walked over to the bar and reached for a bottle of white wine. "Why should the number make any difference?" she asked innocently. "You told me in Harbor Springs that men don't prize virginity anymore, that they don't expect or want a woman to be inexperienced.Right?"
"Right," he said grimly, glowering at the ice cubes in his glass.
"You also said," she continued, biting back a smile, "that women have the same physical desires men have,and that we have the right to satisfy them with whomever we wish.You were very emphatic about that-"
"Lauren," he warned in a low voice, "I asked you a simple question. I don't care what the answer is, I just want an answer so I can stop wondering. Tell me how many there were. Tell me if you liked the, if you didn't give a damn abou them,or if you did it to get even with me.Just tell me.I won't hold it against you."
Like hell you wouldn't! Lauren thought happily as she struggled to uncork the bottle of wine. "Of course you won't hold it against me," she said lightly. "You specifically said-"
"I know what I said," he snapped tersely. "Now,how many?"
She flicked a glance in his direction, implying that she was bewildered by his tone. "Only one."
Angry regret flared in his eyes,and his body tensed as if he had just felt a physical blow. "Did you...care about him?"
"I thought I loved him at the time," Lauren said brightly, twisting the corkscrew deeper into the cork.
"All right.Let's forget him," Nick said curtly. He finally noticed her efforts with the wine bottle and walked over to help her.
"Are you going to be able to forget him?" Lauren asked, admiring the ease with which he managed the stubborn cork.
"I will...after a while."
"What do you mean,after a while? You said there was nothing promiscuous about a woman satisfying her biological-"
"I know what I said,dammit!"
"Then why do you look so angry? You didn't lie to me,did you?"
"I didn't lie," he said, slamming the bottle onto the bar and reaching for a glass from the cabinet. "I believed it at the time."
"Why?" she goaded.
"Because it was convenient to believe it," he bit out. "I was not in love with you then."
Lauren loved him more at that moment than ever. "Would you like me to tell you about him?"
"No," he said coldly.
Her eyes twinkled, but she backed a cautious step out of his reach. "You would have approved of him. He was tall, dark, and handsome, like you. Very elegant,sophisticated and experienced. He wore down my resistence in two days,and-"
"Dammit, stop it!" Nick grated in genuine fury.
"His name is John."
Nick braced both hands on the liguor cabinet,his back to her. "I do not want to hear this!"
"John Nicholas Sinclair," Lauren clarified.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Double Standards

“Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds.”
― David Graeber, quote from Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“It's great having Bruce Springsteen on my show. We have so much in common! We're both from New Jersey, just from different neighborhoods. Sort of like how Martin Luther King and Margaret Mitchell both came from Atlanta. But from different neighborhoods.”
― Jon Stewart, quote from America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction

“Fuck this," Logan bit out before he shoved past the older Strattan. He started down the hallway and I went right after him. We weren't getting answers, not the ones we wanted. We'd find her ourselves.”
― Tijan, quote from Fallen Crest Public

“Que haya normas contra algo no implica que desaparezca.”
― Gennifer Albin, quote from Crewel

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