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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I reminded her of a biological truth established during her despised twentieth century. The smaller the island”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“I would have to accept that for now I was writing not about a poem”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“At this early stage”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Nearly all of life is forgotten.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“he’s simply glad he exists. Whatever the difficulty, the baseline isn’t disturbed.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“We are trapped between the dead and the unborn”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Thinking is always in crisis.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“it might be a deeply embedded inclination within human nature, sustained over hundreds of generations, to find supernatural explanations for natural phenomena.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“In love”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“She is impatient of what I regard as an essential freedom to speculate”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“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”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“But Tony could not free himself from an ungenerous thought. This was fraudulent”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Loss in general. Something pure. If you find that thing at last (which you probably won’t) it will not live up to your hopes. Always beyond reach”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Time for some free verse. Or call it by its real name”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The term did not stretch to include the related Metaphysical Gloom – the collapse of belief in a future”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“From what I’d heard”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“We discuss with our students the causes of this constancy in the language. There are various theories as to why we are at a virtual standstill. The department prefers the view that the past”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Younger guests especially were surprised by the domestic arrangement whereby an educated bookish woman took on so many tasks. Francis would no longer drive”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Interesting to note that in the mid-2030s”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know