“Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he’s absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it’s possible he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Religions, moral systems, her own included, wee like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great ditance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was to judge?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Not men who ran the world, but who made it run.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“The thing about Satan is that he’s amazingly sophisticated. He puts a stupid idea like satanic whatever, abuse, into people’s minds, then he lets it get disproved so everyone thinks that he doesn’t exist after all, and then he’s free to do his worst.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach’s second partita.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“To take up the violin or any instrument was an act of hope, it implied a future.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Chi prende in mano un violino, o qualunque altro strumento, compie un gesto di speranza che comporta il desiderio di un futuro”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“The opposing barristers were in tactical agreement (because it was plainly the judge’s view) that the issue was not merely a matter of education. The court must choose, on behalf of the children, between total religion and something a little less. Between cultures, identities, states of mind, aspirations, sets of family relations, fundamental definitions, basic loyalties, unknowable futures. In such matters there lurked an innate predisposition in favor of the status quo, as long as it appeared benign.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“LONDON. TRINITY TERM one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise longue, staring past her stockinged feet toward the end of the room, toward a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centered on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine. On the floor by the chaise longue, within her reach, the draft of a judgment.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous. For a while, the case had left her numb, caring less, feeling less, going about her business, telling no one. But she became squeamish about bodies, barely able to look at her own or Jack’s without feeling repelled. How was she to talk about this? Hardly plausible, to have told him that at this stage of a legal career, this one case among so many others, its sadness, its visceral”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“nothing, no one, beyond family reunions, near-weekly”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“intent on her phone, reading, tapping, frowning in the contemporary manner.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“but now came another old theme: self-blame. She was selfish, crabbed, drily ambitious. Pursuing her own ends, pretending to herself that her career was not in essence self-gratification, denying an existence to two or three warm and talented individuals. Had her children lived, it would have been shocking to think they might not have. And so here was her punishment, to face this disaster alone, without sensible grown-up children, concerned and phoning, downing tools and rallying round for urgent kitchen-table conferences, talking sense to their stupid father, bringing him back. But would she take him in?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Parents choosing a school for their children—an innocent, important, humdrum, private affair which a lethal blend of bitter division and too much money had transmuted into a monstrous clerical task, into box files of legal documents so numerous and heavy they were hauled to court on trolleys, into hours of educated wrangling, procedural hearings, deferred decisions, the whole circus rising, but so slowly, through the judicial hierarchy like a lopsided, ill-tethered hot-air balloon. If the parents could not agree, the law, reluctantly, must take the decisions.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Just your thing. It’s from a Massachusetts trial. A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he’s absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it’s possible he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Yes, her childlessness was a fugue in itself, a flight- this was the habitual theme she was trying now to resist- a flight from her proper destiny. Her failure to become a woman, as her mother understood the term.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“At her elbow was a slim pile of creamy white paper beside which she laid down her pen. It was only then, at the sight of these clean sheets, that the last traces, the stain, of her own situation vanished completely. She no longer had a private life, she was ready to be absorbed.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
“she described in a separate paragraph the Haredi community, and how within it religious practice was a total way of life. The distinction between what was rendered to Caesar and what to God was meaningless, much as it was for observant Muslims.”
― Ian McEwan, quote from The Children Act
Ian McEwan
Born place: in Aldershot, England, The United Kingdom
Born date June 21, 1948
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“It hurts too much so I don't want to talk about it.”
― Alex Flinn, quote from Beastly
“A bar of gold means much more to a pauper than to a king”
― Brandon Mull, quote from Fablehaven
“In the fairy tales, the poor girl smiles when she becomes a princess. Right now, I don't know if I'll ever smile again.”
― Victoria Aveyard, quote from Red Queen
“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from All the Pretty Horses
“The going was rough, and it was time to get going. There was no time like the present, because the early bird catches the worm.”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from The Guardian
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