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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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"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."
"I enabled your tendency to be vulnerable and weak, and your habits of crying when 6,000 others were present for the music."
"I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?"
"Risk is uncertainty injected into our most vulnerable places. And because that's the case, we may choose not to risk."
"Everyone has their folding-point, Miles. Their mortal vulnerability. Some just keep it in a nonstandard location."
"Unfortunately, fact checking has become a lost art."
"Tenderhearted people are silent sufferers they just learn the art to fly with broken wings."
"He said he'd never opened up to anyone... But that confiding in me, was like learning to breathe all over again. I don't know about you, but how do you turn away from that?"
"Anything cracked will shatter at a touch."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"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."
"For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don't feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say 'When I grow up,' there is always an edge of disbelief-how could they ever be other than what they are?"
"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."
"He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat."
"It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia."
"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."
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