Ian Mcewan Quotes

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

Nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of guilt.

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

Guilt is the very nerve of sorrow.

Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.

I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.

Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

The wounds of conscience always leave a scar.

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

O, my past years in Rangoon are spectres to haunt my soul; and they seem to laugh at me as they shake the chains they have riveted on me.

Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.

Despair doth strike as deep a furrow in the brain as mischief or remorse.

I'm not going to stop torturing myself till I figure out the cause of my pain.

There are materials enough in every man's mind to make a hell there.

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Guilt was its own prison.

One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought.

The imagination is always the best torturer.

There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.

The worst pain in the world is shame.