“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.”
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Author detail
Ian Russell McEwan (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter. He began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. His first two novels, *The Cement Garden* (1978) and The *Comfort of Strangers* (1981), earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His 1997 novel *Enduring Love* was adapted into a film of the same name. He won the Booker Prize with *Amsterdam* (1998). He was awarded the 1999 Shakespeare Prize. His next novel, *Atonement* (2001), garnered acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. He received the 2011 Jerusalem Prize. His later novels have included *The Children Act, Nutshell, Machines Like Me* and *What We Can Know.*
Quotes
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“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.”
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“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
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“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
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“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”
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“We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth”
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“Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.”
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“If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked ab...”
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“He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.”
“There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this...”
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“Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.”
“A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace th...”
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“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”
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“At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.”
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“But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vul...”
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“The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a si...”
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“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...”
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“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”
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“He was thinking of that time, the way one does on long journeys when rootlessness and boredom, lack of sleep or routine can summon from out of nowhere random stretches of the past, make them...”
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“No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.”
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“At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was...”
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