"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

"Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"When its gone, you'll know what a gift love was. you'll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it."
— Ian McEwan (Enduring Love)

"...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 (Atonement)

"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed."
— Ian McEwan

"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 (Atonement)

"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."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

"...finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself."
— Ian McEwan

"And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"She lay in the dark and knew everything."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was blurred, receding against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

"There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"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 (Atonement)

"In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed; finally, you had to measure yourself by other people--there really was nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Falling in love could be achieved in a single word--a glance."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"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."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"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 (Saturday)

"I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee"
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Hard to explain that to the young. we may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"...and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?"
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: 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. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

"It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Who you get, and how it works out- there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily."
— Ian McEwan (Enduring Love)

"How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"...Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning..."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [...] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"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 (Atonement)

"Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas."
— Ian McEwan

"The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.
Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual.
It was difficult to come back."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"The world should take note: not everything is getting worse."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us."
— Ian McEwan (Black Dogs)