What We Can Know Quotes

“I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: If you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“I prefer teaching the post-2015 period, when social media were beginning to be drawn into the currency of private lives, when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. Fascinating! It was as if credulous medieval masses had burst through into modernity, rushing into the wrong theatre and onto the wrong stage set. In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“In love, we forgot that we too were things that could get broken or lost.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“This longing for what was never known and is lost needs its word, something beyond nostalgia, which pines for what was once known.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, musicians, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Was religion a form of mass delusion or even a mild psychosis? Long ago he used to think so but not now. Too many decent intelligent and fully functioning people were believers. Instead”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter – it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“To be elsewhere! It was not true that travel was a false god and that you took your troubles with you and nothing could change. There was the unimaginable and unforeseen thrill of being away, of renewal, and remembering that the world was huge and various, and you and your concerns were small.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“If I stayed and one day resumed my career, I would not only be teaching, I would be fighting again, in committees. We had fought off the construction of a giant mosque on land part-owned by the college, just as we would have opposed a giant cathedral, but we failed against a business-studies building. Biotech was blurring the boundaries between commerce and academia, kids were deserting literature and history to get rich in finance, underqualified foreign students were admitted as cash cows, and we, the old guard, argued against it all and defended our shrinking corner of the humanities, not yet as underfunded as other places, but demoralised, uncertain, our old centrality to the culture gone, our various subjects sunk in the postmodern turmoil of their separate civil wars over ‘theory’, or race or gender or social exclusion – battles that were mostly generational”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“A nation is so large and full of things and ideas that it takes a lot of determined folly to ruin it all. So with the planet. We wrecked much of it, but not everything.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The books in that shop can be summoned in an instant to our screens, but oh, to have wandered the aisles, thrilled to be riding the crest of newness, interest and abundance.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“exaggerated the vitality and beauty of the past and ignored its squalor and cruelty and morbid greed.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“When a young person leaves home after an oppressive upbringing (parents, religion, poverty, in any combination) there might follow a period of destructive rebellion. It can be brief, before the passing years impose some order, or it can last a lifetime.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The imagined lords it over the actual – no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The past, jumbled in the mind, survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present. A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The mind, as I had already noted, was our most erotic feature.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Francis liked to quote T. S. Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’. Sonorous lines, but empty, for no one ever needed that lesson. We can’t care. We are trapped between the dead and the unborn, the past ghosts and the future ghosts, and they matter less. Whether Jack and Jill can pull their marriage together trumps what happened at Thermopylae”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“What I’ve hoped for is the clarity Albert Camus proposed for troubled times.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“He believed he had everything he needed, and he did not need much. A gift not only represented clutter, it took up room in his thoughts as one more distracting obligation of gratitude, as an unwanted requirement to think of someone else, of their goodwill bearing down on him like a low cloud.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“We were an irreligious crowd”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“As Francis reached the end of his third sonnet”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“How hard to see straight when we felt so much.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Mentally”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Tuesdays”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“I am! yet what I am who cares”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The imagined lords it over the actual – no paradox or mystery there.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Francis liked to quote T. S. Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’. Sonorous lines”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Once they were people whose lives”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know