Quotes from On Chesil Beach

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was blurred, receding against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“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.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“It's shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum's sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“How did they meet, and why were these lovers in a modern age so timid and innocent? They regarded themselves as too sophisticated to believe in destiny, but still, it remained a paradoxto them that so momentous a meeting should have been accidental, so dependent on a hundred minor events and choices. What a terrifying possibility, that it might never have happened at all. And in the first rush of love, they often wondered at how nearly their paths had crossed during their early teens, when Edward descended occasionally from the remoteness of his squalid family home in the Chiltern Hills to visit Oxford. It was titillating to believe they must have brushed past each other at one of those famous, youthful city events, at St Giles' Fair in the first week of September, or May Morning at dawn on the first of teh month – a ridiculous and overrated ritual, they both agreed; or while renting a punt at the Cherwell Boat House – though Edward had only ever done it once; or, later in their teens, during illicit drinking at the Turl.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“Without making any great show of it, Mather withdrew from him. Though they saw each other in company, and he was never obviously distant toward Edward, the friendship was never the same. Edward was in agonies when he considered that Mather was actually repelled by his behavior, but he did not have the courage to raise the subject. Besides, Mather made sure they were never alone together. At first Edward believed that his error was to have damaged Mather's pride by witnessing his humiliation, which Edward then compounded by acting as his champion, demonstrating that he was tough while Mather was a vulnerable weakling. Later on, Edward realized that what he had done was simply not cool, and his shame was all the greater. Street fighting did not go with poetry and irony, bebop or history. He was guilty of a lapse of taste. He was not the person he had thought. What he believed was an interesting quirk, a rough virtue, turned out to be a vulgarity. He was a country boy, a provincial idiot who thought a bare-knuckle swipe could impress a friend. It was a mortifying reappraisal. He was making one of the advances typical of early adulthood: the discovery that there were new values by which he preferred to be judged.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“A dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace...”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“…Quando osò dirle che forse non riusciva a “cogliere” il punto del rock ‘n roll e quindi non si vedeva perché insistere, Florence dovette ammettere di non capire la necessità delle percussioni. Con brani così elementari, in larga misura semplici quattro tempi, che bisogno c’era di tutto quel battere e martellare? A che scopo, quando già c’era la chitarra ritmica, e spesso anche il pianoforte? Se ai musicisti serviva sentire il tempo, non potevano procurarsi un metronomo? A quel punto perché non inserire un batterista anche nell’Ennismore Quartet? Edward la baciò e le disse che era la persona più fuori moda di tutto l’Occidente.
- Eppure mi ami, - fece lei.
- No, perciò ti amo.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“Cuando él sugirió que ella, en realidad, no “conectaba” con el rock and roll y que no había motivo para que siguiera intentándolo, ella admitió que lo que no aguantaba era la percusión. Cuando las canciones eran tan elementales, casi todas un simple cuatro por cuatro, ¿por qué aquel incesante golpeteo, estrépito y repiqueteo para llevar el compás? ¿A qué venía, cuando ya había una guitarra rítmica y a menudo un piano? Si los músicos necesitaban oír los compases, ¿por qué no utilizaban un metrónomo?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“Thinking of her friends, she felt the peculiar unshared flavour of her own existence: she was alone.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“It was here one brilliant November midnight that Edward wrote a formal letter to Violet and Geoffrey Ponting declaring his ambition to marry their daughter, and did not quite ask their permission so much as confidently expected their approval.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“He was supposed to be reading, but all he could do was watch her and love her bare arms, her Alice band, her straight back, the sweet tilt of her chin as she tucked the instrument under it...”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“And she could hear a sound, rising steadily, not in steps like a scale, but in a slow glissando, and not quite a violin or a voice, but somewhere in between, rising and rising unbearably, without ever leaving the audible range, a violin-voice that was just on the edge of making sense, telling her something urgent in sibilants and vowels more primitive than words. It may have been inside the room, or out in the corridor, or only in her ears, like tinnitus. She may even have been making the noise herself. She did not care - she had to get out.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust: her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“In fatto di musica, tutti i suoi gesti erano competenti e armoniosi, che stesse impeciando l’archetto, sostituendo le corde o sistemando la stanza per l’arrivo dei tre compagni del quartetto d’archi che era la sua passione. Era Florence la leader indiscussa del gruppo, e a lei spettava sempre l’ultima parola nelle numerose dispute musicali che si presentavano. In tutti gli altri ambiti della vita, in compenso, era di una goffaggine e di un’insicurezza da lasciare allibiti, un continuo inciampare, far cadere oggetti, andare a sbattere. Le stesse dita capaci di un raddoppio su una partita di Bach si rivelavano altrettanto perfette nel rovesciare intere tazze di tè su tovaglie di lino, o bicchieri di vetro su pavimenti di marmo. Se si sentiva osservata incespicava: confidò a Edward che andare incontro a un amico da una certa distanza era per lei un supplizio. E ogni ansia e momento di timidezza la portavano a sollevare in continuazione la mano verso la fronte per scostare immaginarie ciocche di capelli in un gesto delicato e nervoso che perdurava ben oltre la scomparsa del motivo che l’aveva scatenato.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“Come si erano conosciuti, e come mai due innamorati dell’era moderna si rivelano così timidi e ingenui? Pur reputandosi troppo evoluti per credere al destino, restava paradossale ai loro occhi il fatto che un incontro di quella portata potesse essersi verificato per caso, determinato da centinaia di contingenze e scelte indi significanti. L’eventualità che non succedesse affatto era un pensiero tanto terrificante quanto possibile.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“She was not in love, or out of love -- she felt nothing. She just wanted to be here alone in the dusk against the bulk of her giant tree.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

“But on this particular morning, weary of books and birdsong and country peace, Edward took his rickety childhood bike from the shed, raised the saddle, pumped up the tired and set off with no particular plan. He had a pound note and two half crowns in his pocket and all he wanted was forward movement.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from On Chesil Beach

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