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"It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed."
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"There is nothing inherently painful about being cheated on."

"I Have Confidence in Love, And Most of the Time I doubt it."

"It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus' spreads out his sin."

"There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive."

"She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it."

"I lost my illusions in a black rain of bitterness - now what do you see in my eyes? How can you still love me? How can I be tender? ..."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan


"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."


"I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!"


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


"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."


"It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity."


"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."


"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?"


"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."
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