Lessons Quotes

“things will never be as good as we hoped or as bad as we feared.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story. Having followed it this far he needed to know how things would turn out.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release. He was talking – exploding – about something else. What a relief it was, he said as he began to cool down, to see a representation of a bourgeois interior, of a loaf of bread on a board beside a knife, of a couple skating on a frozen canal hand in hand, trying to seize a moment of fun ‘while the fucking priest wasn’t looking. Thank God for the Dutch!”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago. Good decisions came less through rational calculation, more from sudden good moods. But so too did some of his worst decisions. But that was not for now.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Against his chest he felt the baby’s heartbeat, just under twice the rate of his own. Their pulses fell in and out of phase, but one day they would be always out. They would never be this close. He would know him less well, then even less. Others would know Lawrence better than he did, where he was, what he was doing and saying, growing closer to this friend, then this lover. Crying sometimes, alone. From his father, occasional visits, a sincere hug, catch up on work, family, some politics, then goodbye. Until then, he knew everything about him, where he was in every minute, in every place. He was the baby’s bed and his god. The long letting go could be the essence of parenthood and from here was impossible to conceive.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“The years slid over old deaths like a heavy lid. Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget. Should have kept a journal.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by a reckless clique that has surrendered to depraved instinct.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Schrödinger’s cat. A cat concealed in a steel chamber is either killed or not by a randomly activated device. The cat’s state is not known until the chamber is opened. In Schrödinger’s account it is both alive and dead until that moment. In the good outcome, at the reveal, a wave function collapses, the live cat jumps into the arms of its owner, while its other version continues as dead in a universe inaccessible to the owner or her cat. By extension, the world divides at every conceivable moment into an infinitude of invisible possibilities.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Daylight delights you.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“He had reached that point—late thirties was common—when one’s parents set off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major’s car. Then larger parts came away and needed to be gathered or caught mid-air by their children. It was a slow process. Ten”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Той не знаеше коя несъвършена част от себе си да обвини, затова трябваше да е виновен в целостта си.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“During those years his writers were Kerouac, Hesse and Camus. From among the living, Lowell, Moorcock, Ballard and Burroughs. Ballard had been to King’s, Cambridge but Roland forgave him that, as he would have forgiven him anything. He had a romantic view of writers. They should be, if not barefoot bums, light-footed, unrooted, free, living a vagabond life on the edge, gazing into the abyss and telling the world what was down there. Not knighthoods or pearls, for sure. Decades later he was more generous. Less stupid. A tweed jacket never stopped anyone from writing well. He believed it was extremely difficult to write a very good novel and to get halfway there was also an achievement. He deplored the way literary editors commissioned novelists rather than critics to review each other’s work. He thought it was a grisly spectacle, insecure writers condemning the fiction of their colleagues to make elbow room for themselves. His ignorant twenty-seven-year-old self would have sneered at Roland’s favourites now. He was reading through a domestic canon that lay just beyond the great encampments of literary modernism. Henry Green, Antonia White, Barbara Pym, Ford Madox Ford, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Patrick Hamilton. Some had”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear. 4 In the third week after Alissa’s disappearance Roland set about imposing order on the overstuffed bookshelves around the table just off the kitchen.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Her cleverness, her love and knowledge of music, literature, her liveliness and charm when he was securely hers masked her desperation.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“he went back upstairs to stare at himself in the bathroom mirror. Who was he? Captain of the second fifteen? An abject housebound halfwit in his pyjamas? He didn’t know.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Roland’s bad dream was of freedom of expression, a shrinking privilege, vanishing for a thousand years. Christian medieval Europe did without it that long. Islam had never much cared for it. But each of these problems was parochial, local to a mere human timescale.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down irrelevant rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames. Even as he spoke he was amazed by the strength of his feelings and the pleasure of release.”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“saw”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons

“Was it possible to throw his life away in order to be polite?”
― Ian McEwan, Lessons