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"Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose."
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Exlpore more Embarrassment quotes
"It's an embarrassment of riches because you have directors who don't better. You end up with so much stuff going on the screen that you don't know where to look, and that's what I consider self-indulgent."
"Have you ever gotten the feeling that you aren't completely embarassed yet, but you glimpse tomorrow's embarrassment?"
"Excessive literary production is a social offense."
"Juliette ? A tentative voice . " Are you okay? I lower the pillow . Blink up . Warner is wearing a towel . A towel . I want to roll under the bed ."
"Are you referring to the day you instructed me to 'follow the white rabbit,' plied me with absinthe and brownies, and tried to have your way with me? Didn't take long for you to lose your romantic streak, did it?"
"If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death."
"You can imagine my embarrassment when I killed the wrong guy."
"Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"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."
"Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages-he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be."
"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."
"When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh."
"There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already."
"Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There'll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It's a reversion to constant, visceral fear."
"I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand."
"It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid-and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place."
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