Enduring Love Quotes

“When it's 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

“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

“I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“No emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“It's beautiful here and we're still unhappy”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view. ”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“I squeezed her hand and said nothing. I knew little about Keats or his poetry, but I thought it possible that in his hopeless situation he would not have wanted to write precisely because he loved her so much. Lately I'd had the idea that Clarissa's interest in these hypothetical letters had something to do with our own situation, and with her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect. In the months after we'd met, and before we'd bought the apartment, she had written me some beauties, passionately abstract in the ways our love was different from and superior to any that had ever existed. Perhaps that's the essence of a love letter, to celebrate the unique. I had tried to match her, but all that sincerity would permit me were the facts, and they seemed miraculous enough to me: a beautiful woman loved and wanted to be loved by a large, clumsy, balding fellow who could hardly believe his luck.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill-served by the pseudo-clinical term, ‘foreplay’. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation became associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me which I didn’t say out loud because they sounded so banal - Here we are, or, This again or Yes, this. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again. When we fell silent, we would lie so close we were mouth to mouth, delaying the union which bound us all the more because of this prelude.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“How do you feel?'
Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.'
But you don't look it.'
I feel I'm shivering inside.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“... her conviction that love that did not find its expression in a letter was not perfect.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“As we walked back to the car, Johnny said, "A tree's one thing, but it's a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically, you're giving them permission to kill you.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict - what to give to others, and what to keep for yourself.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“God's love may take the form of wrath. It can show itself to us as a calamity. This is the difficult lesson its taken me a lifetime to learn.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Even a trashy movie can make you cry. There were deep emotional reactions that ducked the censure of the higher reasoning processes and forced us to enact, however vestigially, our roles - me, the indignant secret lover revealed; Clarissa the woman cruelly betrayed.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Say it again slowly, that thing about the river.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“I didn't know, nor have I ever discovered, who let go first. I'm not prepared to accept that it was me. But everyone claims not to have been first. What is certain is that if we had not broken ranks, our collective weight would have brought the balloon to earth a quarter of the way down the slope a few seconds later as the gust subsided. But as I've said, there was no team, there was no plan, no agreement to be broken. No failure. So can we accept that it was right, every man for himself? Were we all happy afterwards that this was a reasonable course? We never had that comfort, for there was a deeper covenant, ancient and automatic, written in our nature. Co-operation - the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion. Our misery in the aftermath was proof that we knew we had failed ourselves. But letting go was in our nature too. Selfishness is also written in our hearts.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“I saw the same joy, the same uncontrollable smile in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped Scottish granny and a pale correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their trolleys in and recognised a figure in the expectant crowd. Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“We often tell ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“Lately I’ve noticed these mouths in some women of my age. A lifetime of putting out, as they saw it, and getting nothing back. The men were bastards, the social contract unjust, and biology itself an affliction.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“All copulating creatures are vulnerable to attack, but selection over time must have proved that reproductive success was best served by undivided attention. Better to allow the occasional couple to be eaten midrapture than dilute by one jot a vigorous procreational urge. But for seconds on end I had wholesomely and simultaneously indulged two of life's central, antithetical pleasures, reading and fucking.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

“...I experienced a sudden ache -- part desolation, part panic -- to observe the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person.”
― Ian McEwan, Enduring Love