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"Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air."
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"Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure."

"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."

"It is not age but experience that brings wisdom."

"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."

"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young."

"I don't know of any other creature on earth other than man that will sit in a corner and cry because of some painful experience in the past."

"Religion is an experience, not a bunch of doctrines."

"You, the unhappy young! Try to take a leaf out of the old happy's book!"

"Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we're still alone, each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together."

"Passing pleasures, like passing clouds, are all we have."
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan


"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."


"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."


"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious."


"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."


"When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through."


"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"


"Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end."
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