Ian Mcewan Quotes

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Sometimes, I am also identified as a civil rights leader or a human rights activist. I would also like to be thought of as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else, yet unique in my own way, much like everyone else.

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.

I don't think I'm a weirdo in a bad way. There's just a lot going on in my head.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

We are unique. Chimpanzees are unique. Dogs are unique. But we humans are just not as different as we used to think.

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

It is possible to analyze the biological and social influences that make each human being unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable, but this analysis does not explain how and why each feels different from all other human beings.

Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

I think, there are many people who are much smarter than I am, and many, many, many who are much harder-working than I am, but in terms of the range of my activities, they're unique.

The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

I can no longer be sure whether the psyche is in me or whether I'm in the psyche.

I think of myself as a human being.

Being alive is a common road. It's what we notice makes us different.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?