Ian Mcewan Quotes

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

I'd never been content in America.

I used to dream of being other places, other people. It was an escape for me.

I always lived by railroads, and I would find places to just look at the horizon, and I always expected there was something somewhere else. And sometimes I think that's more a metaphysical somewhere else rather than just to get out of the town.

I think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.

There are times when you wish you were somewhere else, and someone else.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

How terrible it is to have no cares, no longings. I do not fit. I feel too deeply and want too much. As cages go, it is a gilded one, but I shall not live well in it or any cage for that matter.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.

The trees called to me, urging me to abandon what I knew and vanish into the oncoming night. It was a desire that had been tugging me with disconcerting frequency these days.

Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.

I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time.

I used to think I was unstable, because I had this thirst for something. I could never figure out what it was. I couldn’t sleep at night, and I always wanted to be somewhere else. I have a window tattooed, this little box, and it’s because wherever I was, I wanted to be somewhere else. And, I always saw myself, wherever I was in life, staring out the window.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.