Ian Mcewan Quotes

It is the way of mortals. They fling themselves at life and emerge broken.

We live in bodies that are fearfully and wonderfully made, yet they are not immune to illness and pain. We have hearts that are capable of experiencing great love, but sometimes they get broken.

Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin.

We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.

The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.

It's easy to forget people are blood and bone. They're not indestructible.

Jeezum—humans were like eggshells.

Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there's the trick!

Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and the storm within.

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

...We're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.

Little fly, thy summer's play My thoughtless hand has brushed away. Am not I a fly like thee? Or art not thou a man like me? For I dance and drink and sing, Till some blind hand shall brush my wing!

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.

We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).

Nature is a hanging judge," goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.

Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.

As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

Creatures of a day, what is any one? What is he not? Man is but a dream of a shadow. Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rest upon men a radiant light and, aye, a gentle life.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.

Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.

All human things hang on a slender thread, the strongest fall with a sudden crash.

each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.

For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.