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"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. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually."
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"Oh, to awake from dreaming!"
"Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound."
"We switch to another language-- not our invented language or the language we've learned from our lives. As we walk further up the mountain, we speak the language of silence. This language gives us time to think and move. We can be here and elsewhere at the same time."
"I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost," while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head."
"I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got."
"I will never tell another person, "I don't understand you... and why? Because if I say that, it means that I am disabled in a way. The inability to connect to another's perspective is, I believe, a disability."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can't see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the'll neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won't melt the ice in his heart.He must be ruthless!No religion, no purpose except this:Make something perfect before you die.Life is short, art is for all time."
"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."
"There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness."
"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 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."
"However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you're inside them."
"There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust."
"Or he was simply pretending-like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before."
"Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose."
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