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"All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?"
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"One crime has to be concealed by another."

"Every sin is the result of a collaboration."

"It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so."

"I guess having one hundred and four condoms full of heroin in your guts and the thought of a firing squad in your head make will make most things seem insignificant."

"I think seeing some of the past can be helpful, especially if you're into crime solving."

"I was long brought up to think that it was nothing short of a crime to miss a sale."

"This was a new buzz, better than anything I'd tried before. For the first time, I could fight back at others. I'd even fight with a parked car! I was totally kyboshed on these drugs, I didn't care how many boys were standing outside the pub, I'd run over and fight the lot of them. Even though I came off second best, in my mind, I still walked away a winner. I showed them I wasn't a little shit-bag that always got battered, not when I had the drugs in me."

"It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace."
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."


"Or he was simply pretending-like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before."


"She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten."


"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."


"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?"


"In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition."


"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."


"The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance. The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained."


"In difficult moments it's sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can't, move on to the second best thing."


"While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew."
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