Black Dogs Quotes

“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

“Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“These were the months that shaped us.behind all our frustrations over all these years has been the wish to get back to those happy days.Once we began to see the world differently we could feel time running out on us and we were impatient with each other.Every disagreement was an interruption of what we knew was possible-and soon there was only interruption.And in the end time did run out,but memories are still there,accusing us,and we still can't let each other alone.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“I am uncertain whether our civilization at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“The work we have to do is with ourselves ,If we're ever going to be at peace with each other.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“Now time, afternoon time, which in the Midi is as elemental as air and light, expanded and rolled billowingly outwards across the rest of the day, and upwards to the vaults of the cobalt sky, freeing everyone in its delicious sprawl from their obligations.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“I met evil and discovered God. I call it my discovery, but of course, it’s nothing new, and it’s not mine. Everyone has to make it for himself. People use different language to describe it. I suppose all the great world religions began with individuals making inspired contact with a spiritual reality and then trying to keep that knowledge alive. Most of it gets lost in rules and practices and addiction to power. That’s how religions are. In the end though it hardly matters how you describe it once the essential truth has been grasped – that we have within us an infinite resource, a potential for a higher state of being, a goodness . . .’ I had heard this before, in one form or another, from a spiritually inclined headmaster, a dissident vicar, an old girlfriend returning from India, from Californian professionals, and dazed hippies.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“at some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“So June´s idea was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilisation´s worst moods.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“La folla è una creatura lenta e un po' idiota, di gran lunga meno intelligente degli individui che la compongono.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“And I was with the man I loved and we were rabbiting on about how we were going to help change the world, and we were on our way home to start our lives together. I even remember thinking to myself, I’ve never been happier than this. This is it!”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“distances between villages, choices of footpaths, the routing of fascism, class struggle, and the great engine of history whose direction was now known to science and which had granted to the Party its inalienable right to govern, all merged to one spectacular view, a beckoning avenue unrolling from the starting point of their love, out across the vast prospect of causse and mountains which reddened as they spoke, then darkened.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“They are crossing the shadow line and going deeper where the sun never reaches, and the amiable drunken mayor will not be sending his men in pursuit for the dogs are crossing the river in the dead of night, and forcing a way up the other side to cross the Causse; and as sleep rolls in they are receding from her, black stains in the grey of the dawn, fading as they move into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“she had no faith in the abstract principles according to which ‘committed intellectuals think to engineer social change’. All she could believe in, she told Jenny, ‘are short-term, practical, realisable goals. Everyone has to take responsibility for his own life and attempt to improve it, spiritually in the first instance, materially if need be.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“The truth is, we love each other, we've never stopped, we're obsessed. And we failed to do a thing with it. We couldn't make a life. We couldn't give up the love, but we wouldn't bend to its power.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“I met evil and discovered God. I call it my discovery, but of course, it's nothing new, and it's not mine. Everyone has to make it for himself. People use different languages to describe it. I suppose all the great world religions began with individuals making inspired contact with a spiritual reality and then trying to keep that knowledge alive. Most of it gets lost in rules and practices and addiction to power.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism - which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right - came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character's growth.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“If I can't get along with the father of my children, how can the world make progress?”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“Rationalism is a blind faith.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“I didn't quite know it at the time, but I sensed it in my fear--these animals were the creations of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could account for. The evil I'm talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives, within a family, and then it's children who suffer most. And then, when the conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. Then it sinks backs and waits, It's something in our hearts . . . This is what I know. Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, consciousness itself--call it what you like--in the end, it's all we've got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“Our desires permeate our perceptions”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. 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 going to be at peace with each other, I'm not saying it'll happen. There's a good chance it won't. I'm saying it's our only chance.”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs