Quotes from Sweet Tooth

“I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Love doesn't grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“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, quote from Sweet Tooth

“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.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“My needs were simple I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Oblivion seemed the only reasonable option.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“My needs were simple. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Non badavo granché a tematiche o felicità di stile, e saltavo le descrizioni minute di tempo atmosferico, paesaggi e interni. Volevo personaggi in cui potessi credere, e volevo provare curiosità per ciò che avrebbero vissuto. […] Romanzi a sensazione, alta letteratura e tutto ciò che stava nel mezzo: a ognuno riservavo lo stesso rude trattamento.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“The constrained lives of his characters made me wonder how my own existence might appear in his hands.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn’t possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“What I took to be the norm -- taut, smooth, supple -- was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“That evening he plays with the children, cleans the hamster's cage with them, gets them into their pyjamas, and reads to them three times over, once together, then to Jake on his own, then to Naomi. It is at times like these that his life makes sense. How soothing it is, the scent of clean bedlinen and minty toothpaste breath, and his children's eagerness to hear the adventures of imaginary beings, and how touching, to watch the children's eyes grow heavy as they struggle to hang on to the priceless last minutes of their day, and finally fail.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I read anything I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“He found and praised Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat. I said I found it too schematic and preferred The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

“I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Sweet Tooth

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Popular quotes

“„Este clar că femeile sunt mai deştepte decît bărbaţii. Gîndiţi-vă — cel mai bun prieten al lor sînt diamantele; cel mai bun prieten al bărbaţilor este cîinele.”
― Allan Pease, quote from Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It

“For what its worth, you're good for him," he said.
Healther looked up at him, surprised.
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“It could be worse," he said finally. "Efrenia married an arsonist. Jake's wife is a kleptomaniac. I suppose, a psychopathic spree killer isn't that odd of a choice, considering.”
― Ilona Andrews, quote from Bayou Moon

“How can we continue to have festivities after so many have died? (Rowena)
The same way we managed to laugh while we were in prison. You have to, otherwise you will go mad from the grief. Sometimes it helps to shout. Let the angels hear your rage. (Stryder)”
― Kinley MacGregor, quote from A Dark Champion

“his hands moved busily among the puppets, choosing, discarding, until they pounced finally on the moon with her crystal eyes and her hands shaped like stars.
'I will be the moon,' Kyel said. 'You must make a wish to me.'
Lydea slid her fingers into the fox's head, with its sly smile and fiery velvet pelt. 'I wish,' she said, 'that you would take your nap.'
'No,' the prince said patiently, 'you must make a true wish. And I will grant it because I am the moon.'
'Then I must make a fox's wish. I wish for an open door to every hen house, and the ability to jump into trees.'
The moon sank onto the blue hillock of Kyel's knee. 'Why?'
'So that I can escape the farmer's dogs when they run after me.'
'Then you should wish,' the prince said promptly, 'that you could jump as high as the moon.'
'A good wish. But there are no hens on the moon, and how would I get back to Ombria?'
The moon rose again, lifted a golden hand. 'On a star.'
The governess smiled. The fox stroked the prince's hair while he shook away the moon and replaced it with the sorceress, who had one amethyst eye and one emerald, and who wore a black cloak that shimmered with ribbons of faint, changing colors.
'I am the sorceress who lives underground,' the prince said. 'Is there really a sorceress who lives underground?'
'So they --' Lydea checked herself, let the fox speak. 'So they say, my lord.'
'How does she live? Does she have a house?'
She paused again, glimpsing a barely remembered tale. 'I think she does. Maybe even her own city beneath Ombria. Some say that she has an ancient enemy, who appears during harsh and perilous times in Ombria's history. Then and only then does the sorceress make her way out of her underground world to fight the evil and restore hope to Ombria.'
...
The sorceress descended, long nose down on the silk. Kyel picked another puppet up, looked at it silently a moment. The queen of pirates, whose black nails curved like scimitars, whose hair was a rigid knoll in which she kept her weapons, stared back at him out of glittering onyx eyes.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, quote from Ombria in Shadow

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BookQuoters 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.

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