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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“we are all innocent children in the tall forest of our clever inventions.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts. As one of the brighter students pointed out, surely they could have done something other than grow their economies and wage wars.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“small share of the world’s pleasures. I had suffered and I was owed.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven.” ”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Where there was order, there was mental space and calm.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“What, she demanded, of the self-serving short-sightedness or plain folly or mendacity or viciousness of political leaders – take your pick – and the quiescence or craven idiocy or terror of their populations?”
― 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

“Fifteen”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Easier to applaud than to attempt something apt. To drink as they had, then listen to fifteen sonnets in Blundy’s condensed style was a cruel demand. Helpless daydreaming was inevitable. But the sense of a serious historic occasion was not diminished.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“a long scramble to the shore. On some sections we”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“The mighty past wears hard against the present, like oceans, wind and rain on limestone cliffs.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“He repeated, ‘I think you do. If you throw out poor old hopefully, to be consistent you’ll have to throw out a lot of other sentence adverbs doing the same work. If I say, seriously, you’re wrong, I’m not talking about the way you’re wrong. I’m talking about the way I’m telling you this. And if I say, frankly, I don’t like being talked down to, I mean I’m being frank. Admittedly – that is, I admit – this is your house, but please don’t tell me how to speak. Bluntly, it’s rude. So, if you’ll get off my back, Mr Blundy, then hopefully we’ll get along, which means not only that I hope we will, but I’m making a hopeful prediction.”
― 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

“Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Far-off England was the cold locus of ungenerous morals and disapproval,”
― 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

“I had started keeping a journal soon after seeing my future husband playing in his jazz band in the Cowley pub. My entries were never regular, and I often had to force myself to write them. I tried to keep going because, like Francis, I believed that most of life is oblivion. To rescue fragments of the past would be to claim a bigger existence.”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

“Charles Dickens. ‘The spring of hope…the winter of despair.’ 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”
― Ian McEwan, What We Can Know