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"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."
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"Sudden acquaintance brings repentance."
"What matter most is not the sin. The moment of repentance: go and sin no more."
"But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her."
"Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another."
"Life's too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, So ... Love the people who treat you right and pray for the ones who don't. Life is 10% what you make it 90% how you take it."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."
"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"
"It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity."
"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?"
"They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling. ... They moved closer, deeper and then, for seconds on end, everything stopped. Instead of an ecstatic frenzy, there was stillness. They were stilled not by the astonishing fact of arrival, but by an awed sense of return - they were face to face in the gloom, staring into what little they could see of each other's eyes, and now it was the impersonal that dropped away."
"All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?"
"He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin."
"She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn't let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil."
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