“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
Ian McEwan
Born place: in Aldershot, England, The United Kingdom
Born date June 21, 1948
See more on GoodReads
“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Fifth Season
“And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
“I kiss him to get him to stop talking. If he keeps talking I will love him, and I don't want to love him. I really don't. As strategies go, it's not my finest. Kissing is just another way of talking except without the words.”
― Nicola Yoon, quote from The Sun Is Also a Star
“Love in my world usually ended up with someone hearing “I smite thee!” as she was cursed to be some lame flower for the rest of her life.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Daimon
“Why is it that we honor the Great Thieves of Whitehall, for Acts that in Whitechapel would merit hanging? Why admire one sort of Thief, and despise the other? I suggest, 'tis because of the Scale of the Crime.--What we of the Mobility love to watch, is any of the Great Motrices, Greed, Lust, Revenge, taken out of all measure, brought quite past the scale of the ev'ryday world, approaching what we always knew were the true Dimensions of Desire. Let Antony lose the world for Cleopatra, to be sure,--not Dick his Day's Wages, at the Tavern.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Mason & Dixon
Pygmy
The Stories of Breec...
This Shattered World
What If?: Serious Sc...
Sweep in Peace
House of SunsBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
