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Ian McEwan   ::   Amsterdam

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It would have been possible to back out of his engagements by assuming the licence of the free artistic spirit, but he loathed such arrogance. He had a number of friends who played the genius card when it suited, failing to show up to this or that in the belief that whatever local upset it caused, it could only increase respect for the compelling nature of their high calling. These types - novelists were by far the worst - managed to convince friends and families that not only their working hours, but every nap and stroll, every fit of silence, depression or drunkenness bore the exculpatory ticket of high intent.
He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future.

Ian McEwan   ::   Atonement

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... a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.

Ian McEwan   ::   Black Dogs

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June and Bernard, sexually obsessed. Since I had only ever known them elderly and hostile, I would have liked to tell her that, like a child with the blasphemous notion of the Queen on the lavatory, I found it hard to imagine.

Ian McEwan   ::   Enduring Love

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I couldn't find the word for what I felt ... It is clearly not true that without language there is no thought. I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word.
Don't ever walk by me as if I wasn't there. Neither of us can be fooled. Never deny my reality, because in the end you'll deny yourself.
Like many before me, I had come to the slow acknowledgement that the mind-altering substance of choice in a pressured, successful middle life is alcohol. Licit, social, with one's mild addiction easily concealed among everyone else's, and in all its infinite, ingenious manifestations, so colourful, so tasty, the drink in your hand triumphs by its very form; its liquidity is at one with the everyday, with milk, tea, coffee, with water, and therefore with life itself. Drinking is natural, whereas inhaling a smouldering vegetable is at some remove from breathing, as is the ingestion of pills from eating, and there is no penetration in nature that resembles that of the needle, except an insect's sting. A single malt and spring water, a cool glass of Chablis, may improve your outlook by only a modest degree, but will leave unruffled the glassy continuum of your selfhood.

Ian McEwan   ::   Saturday

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... like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before.
Will he be able to bear it, having these pastimes only in his past?

Ian McEwan   ::   Sweet Tooth

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Sometimes not talking is the best way through a difficulty. The fad for personal 'truth' and confrontation was doing great damage in my view and blighting many friendships and marriages.

Ian McEwan   ::   the Comfort of Strangers

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She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
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books i've read..
2013 [12 read]
2012 [36 read]
2011 [5 read]
2010 [6 read]
2009 [5 read]
2008 [21 read]
2007 [31 read]
2006 [37 read]
2005 [37 read]
2004 [32 read]
2003 [18 read]
2002 [52 read]
2001 [43 read]
2000 [7 read]
1999 [25 read]
1998 [3 read]
unknown year [65 read]

read over the years