The Child in Time Quotes

“For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“...children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Past a certain age, men froze into place; they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“…the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“And there was no richer field for speculation assertively dressed as fact than child care. He had read the background material, the extracts compiled by Canham’s department. For three centuries generations of experts, priests, moralists, social scientists, doctors—mostly men—had been pouring out instructions and ever-mutating facts for the benefit of mothers. No one doubted the absolute truth of his judgments, and each generation knew itself to stand on the pinnacle of common sense and scientific insight to which its predecessors had merely aspired. He had read solemn pronouncements on the necessity of binding the newborn baby’s limbs to a board to prevent movement and self-inflicted damage; of the dangers of breast feeding or, elsewhere, its physical necessity and moral superiority; how affection or stimulation corrupts a young child; the importance of purges and enemas, severe physical punishment, cold baths, and, earlier in this century, of constant fresh air, however inconvenient; the desirability of scientifically controlled intervals between feeds, and, conversely, of feeding the baby whenever it is hungry; the perils of picking a baby up whenever it cries (that makes it feel dangerously powerful) and of not picking it up when it cries (dangerously impotent); the importance of regular bowel movements, of potty training a child by three months, of constant mothering all day and night, all year, and elsewhere of the necessity of wet nurses, nursery maids, twenty-four-hour state nurseries; the grave consequences of mouth-breathing, nose-picking, thumb-sucking, and maternal deprivation, of not having your child expertly delivered under bright lights, of lacking the courage to have it at home in the bath, of failing to have it circumcised or its tonsils removed, and, later, the contemptuous destruction of all these fashions; how children should be allowed to do whatever they want so that their divine natures can blossom, and how it is never too soon to break a child’s will; the dementia and blindness caused by masturbation, and the pleasures and comfort it affords the growing child; how sex can be taught by reference to tadpoles, storks, flower fairies, and acorns, or not mentioned at all, or only with lurid, painstaking frankness; the trauma imparted to the child who sees its parents naked, the chronic disturbance nourished by strange suspicions if it only ever sees them clothed; how to give your nine-month-old baby a head start by teaching it math.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born. He knew only outlines and details from stories—his mother in a department store, praised for the neatness of the bow she could tie behind her back; his father walking through a ruined town in Germany, or crossing the tarmac of an airfield to give the official news of victory to the squadron leader. Even when their stories began to concern himself, Stephen knew next to nothing of how his parents met, what attracted them, how they decided to get married, or how he had come about. It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realize that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Stephen, talk to a ten-year-old in midsummer about Christmas. You could be talking to an adolescent about his retirement plans, his pension. For children, childhood is timeless. It’s always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course they have memories. Of course time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up…’ there’s always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are? Now you say Lemonade wasn’t written for children, and I believe you, Stephen. Like all good writers, you wrote it for yourself. And this is my point. It was your ten-year-old self you addressed. This book is not for children, it’s for a child, and that child is you.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“To women this thought was a premise. It was a constant torment or comfort, no matter how successful they were in their own or other people’s eyes. It was also a weakness and a strength. Committed motherhood denied professional fulfillment. A professional life on men’s terms eroded maternal care. Attempting both was to risk annihilation through fatigue. It was not so easy to persist when you could not believe that you were entirely the thing that you did, when you thought you could find yourself, or find another part of yourself, expressed through some other endeavor. Consequently, women were not taken in so easily by jobs and hierarchies, uniforms and medals. Against the faith men had in the institutions they and not women had shaped, women upheld some other principle of selfhood,”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“The Official Commission on Child Care, known to be a pet concern of the prime minister’s, had spawned fourteen subcommittees whose task was to make recommendations to the parent body. Their real function, it was said cynically, was to satisfy the disparate ideals of myriad interest groups—the sugar and fast-food lobbies; the garment, toy, formula milk, and firework manufacturers; the charities; the women’s organizations; the pedestrian-controlled crosswalk pressure group people—who pressed in on all sides.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Now that Stephen had joined the throng he expected, with so much reading and talking and listening behind him, to be an expert, like everybody else. But it was as if he were trying to write afresh a book that had already been written. The ground was so well prepared, planted up with myth and cliché, and the tradition so firmly established, that he could no more think clearly about his own situation than a medieval painter could, by taking thought, invent perspective.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Stephen thought that if he could do everything with the intensity and abandonment with which he had once helped Kate build her castle, he would be a happy man of extraordinary powers.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“It needed a child, Stephen thought, succumbing to the inevitable. Kate would not be aware of the car half a mile behind, or of the wood’s perimeters and all that lay beyond them—roads, opinions, government. The wood, this spider rotating on its thread, this beetle lumbering over blades of grass, would be all, the moment would be everything. He needed her good influence, her lessons in celebrating the specific, how to fill the present and be filled by it to the point where identity faded to nothing. He was always partly somewhere else, never quite paying attention, never wholly serious. Wasn’t that Nietzsche’s idea of true maturity, to attain the seriousness of a child at play?”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realize that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he had always thought there would be time.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“They had been married six years, a time of slow, fine adjustments to the jostling principles of physical pleasure, domestic duty, and the necessity of solitude. Neglect of one led to diminishment or chaos in the others.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Any five-year-old girl – though boys would do – gave substance to her continued”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“year-old girl. It was more than a habit, for a habit could be broken. This was a deep disposition, the outline experience had stencilled on character. It was not”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time

“Get in first and shape the terms.”
― Ian McEwan, The Child in Time