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"It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance."
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"Thought, if I may put it, is the man behind the possession, appearance, things we like, things we hate and the very epitome of life."

"Your subconscious mind is the universal mind with a universal consciousness."

"Absolute is infinite so there is no absolute truth. There is truth that you can see in infinite ways and make your own."

"Every aspect of your life will be enlivened when you start to think and communicate with your heart and mind in cohesive coordinated harmony."

"Think about yourself because no one has time to think about you. Everyone is busy thinking about themselves."

"I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known."

"I don't know who you are or where you are, but I know your deep driving desires. I am writing to you to make your life a little easier and better."

"There are two kinds of people:those who learned to love and those who didn't."

"Any education that doesn't allow you to think freely is not an education but a prison."

"I came to this world to bloom and spread my love to fill the world with happiness."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan


"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."


"The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained."


"A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it."


"They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away."


"In difficult moments it's sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can't, move on to the second best thing."


"I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self...God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually."


"The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him."


"He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to."


"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"
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