1
When it's gone, you'll know what a gift love was. You'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it.Ian Mcewan
2
The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.Ian Mcewan
3
Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.Ian Mcewan
4
The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.Ian Mcewan
5
This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.Ian Mcewan
6
And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.Ian Mcewan
7
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.Ian Mcewan
8
He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.Ian Mcewan
9
We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truthIan Mcewan
10
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.Ian Mcewan
11
Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.Ian Mcewan
12
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.Ian Mcewan
13
He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.Ian Mcewan
14
He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.Ian Mcewan
15
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.Ian Mcewan
16
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?Ian Mcewan
17
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.Ian Mcewan
18
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.Ian Mcewan
19
No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.Ian Mcewan
20
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home-- Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?Ian Mcewan