Ian McEwan

“It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.”

“But when I was an energetic self-important 10-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me – they were all aged – I worried that what showed in my face was pity.”

“In difficult moments it’s sometimes a good idea to ask yourself what it is you most want to be doing and consider how it can be achieved. If it can’t, move on to the second best thing.”

“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”

“The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.”

“We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth”

“When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.”

“When she found a place of her ownand packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear,"He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she’s there all day.”

“Where the human need for order meetsthe human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.”

“And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.”

“Memory's got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember.”

“Clive was losing sensation in his feet, and as he stamped them the rhythm gave him back the ten note falling figure, ritardando, a cor anglais, and rising softly against it, contrapuntally, cellos in mirror image. Her face in it. The end.”

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”

“Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.”

“She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.”

“When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.”

“These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.”

“So here I am, upside down in a woman.”

“He saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered e-mails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply and lovers he had not owned up to.”

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”