top of page

"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Morality quotes

"What does greed mean? Greed means taking away what belongs to others."

"One is God himself, [but] for how long does that authority of God last? As long as he speaks the truth, practices non-violence, does not steal, practices celibacy and remains non-acquisitive " till then power of God will remain."

"Every animal is biologically designed by Nature to do wrong in return. It takes a human being to not do wrong in return."

"All humans are rogues. Cured only by death."

"Do we ignore the needyto spite the greedy?Or share and defenddespite those who pretend?"

"Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan


"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."
bottom of page