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"In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage."
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Exlpore more Communication quotes
"Don't use your words to criticize, condemn, or complain; us your words to appreciate, inspire, and empower."
"The thing is that it could never again feel natural to talk to her."
"Spoken words have power beyond measure."
"It's hard to communicate anything exactly and that's why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."
"Our speech is poor interpretation of our perception."
"Meetings! Meetings! Meetings!Do they ever achieve anything or do they just let a lot of hot air out of an already over inflated balloon?"
"Confrontation affords you the opportunity to hear the other side of the story."
"When we talk, we express our preconceived thoughts, when we listen, we learn and give birth to new thoughts."
"If you have a complaint about someone, then you become the accuser and the other becomes the accused. Never complain about anyone. He who brings a complaint is at fault, you should understand that first, then comes next, the talk about the accused."
"They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"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."
"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation."
"These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel."
"I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence."
"She had not thought it would be so easy to slip into the old roles. Cambridge had changed her fundamentally and she thought she was immune. No one in her family, however, noticed the transformation in her, and she was not able to resist the power of their habitual expectations."
"But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me."
"She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge."
"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."
"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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