Ian Mcewan Quotes

I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.

Let's learn to live, for we must die alone.

We die alone, but we live among men.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

Now, I'm the only living member of that group. There was the six of us originally and they're now all gone.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.

Of my friends I am the only one left.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.