"When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh."

Life, War, Hope, Family, Dream

35

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh."

Exlpore more Life quotes

"The condition you're in at this moment is the product of your previous thoughts, to change your condition, change your thoughts."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Personal Development

"And there wasn't anything he wanted to do that he couldn't make time for. What did he have to mope about, really? What more did he want? Love, he could hear Eve saying. Purpose. Love. Purpose. Those are the things that you can't plan for. Those are the things that just happen. And what if they don't happen? Do you spend your whole life pining for them? Waiting to be happy?"

Rainbow Rowell, American Author

Life, Love, Purpose, Desire

"Eleanor had never thought about killing herself " ever " but she thought a lot about stopping."

Rainbow Rowell, American Author

Life, Thought, End, Emotion

"An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind."

Karl Schlegel, German Philosopher

Life, Goal, Artist, Mind

"Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting."

P. G. Wodehouse, English Writer

Life, Despair, Salvation, Worth

"The question isn't who will be with me in life, rather how will I create the ending I am proud of?"

Shannon L. Alder, American Author

Life, Creation, Truth, Wisdom

"If you have never met a woman that would never give up, then you have never met a woman that has seen miracles."

Shannon L. Alder, American Author

Life, Faith, Truth, Happiness, Wisdom

"People who truly live their lives don't have time to complain or judge others. They're too busy enjoying life and love and everything in between!"

Charlotte Eriksson, American Psychologist

Life, Positivity, Happiness, Love

"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, American Writer

Life, Painting

"You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down."

Stephen King, American Author

Life, Death, Truth, Regret, Wisdom

Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan

"If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up."

Philosophy

"Or he was simply pretending-like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before."

Denial

"Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose."

Embarrassment

"Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy."

Writing

"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."

Relationship

"In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage."

Communication

"Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached."

Life

"He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them as real as a haunting. --Solar."

Nostalgia

"Growing up in a cathedral precinct, what did I know of the absurdities of communism, of how brave man and women in bleak and remote penal colonies were reduced to thinking day by day of nothing else beyond their own survival?"

Survival

"In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition."

Media