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"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?"
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"Turns out rolling your eyes in a bar when 'Land Down Under' plays is like someone belching during the Star Spangled Banner in America."

"The tendency to trust easily anyone gives way to a certain vulnerability."

"What was worse, he couldn't tell her how much he thought he maybe might kinda sorta love her."

"There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone."

"I embrace my sensitivity and let it enhance my joy every day."

"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."

"It was so hard to feel safe in the world when you were a girl."

"Everything feels right with the world......and the sad thing is that I know it's a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I'm broken, or the world is broken."

"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."

"In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm's length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings."
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."


"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?"


"Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it's a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are."
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