Frases de Ian McEwan

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“Los relatos no se venden. Los editores suelen hacer estas colecciones como un favor a sus autores consagrados.”

“Lo necesito. Tengo cincuenta y nueve años. Es mi último cartucho. Todavía no he visto pruebas de que exista otra vida después de ésta.”

“El amor sufre luengo y es amable; el amor no envidia; el amor no se jacta, no es pomposo, no se comporta de una forma indecorosa, no busca su provecho, no se deja provocar, no medita maldades; se deleita no en la iniquidad, sino en la verdad…”

“desde el siglo XVI la base de la política inglesa y posteriormente británica en Europa fue la consecución del equilibrio de poder. Se me ordenó que leyera sobre el Congreso de Viena de 1815. Tony insistía en que un equilibrio entre naciones era el cimiento de un sistema jurídico internacional de diplomacia pacífica. Era vital que los países se controlasen mutuamente.”

“Que los filósofos de la ciencia se engañen creyendo lo contrario, pero la física estaba exenta de contaminación humana, describía un mundo que existiría igual si no existieran los hombres y las mujeres y todas sus tristezas.”

“Me pregunta usted qué hice cuando vi a aquella chica. Bueno, pues se lo diré. ¿Ve usted ese armario de ahí, que llena casi toda la habitación? Vine corriendo hasta aquí, me metí dentro y me hice una paja. No vaya a creer que me la hice pensando en la chica. No, no podría soportarlo. Retrocedí en mis recuerdos hasta que medía tres pies de altura. Eso me hizo terminar antes. Veo que piensa que soy sucio y retorcido. Pues después me lavé las manos, cosa que no todos hacen.”

“Cuando él sugirió que ella, en realidad, no “conectaba” con el rock and roll y que no había motivo para que siguiera intentándolo, ella admitió que lo que no aguantaba era la percusión. Cuando las canciones eran tan elementales, casi todas un simple cuatro por cuatro, ¿por qué aquel incesante golpeteo, estrépito y repiqueteo para llevar el compás? ¿A qué venía, cuando ya había una guitarra rítmica y a menudo un piano? Si los músicos necesitaban oír los compases, ¿por qué no utilizaban un metrónomo?”

“Así que desandaría el camino que había recorrido, recorrería hacia atrás todo lo que había avanzado, cruzando marisma resecas y lóbregas, sobrepasando al sargento feroz en el puente, atravesaría el pueblo bombardeado, seguiría a lo largo de la cinta de la carretera los kilómetros de onduladas tierras de labranza, buscando el camino a la izquierda en el lindero del pueblo, enfrente de la zapatería, y tres kilómetros más allá saltaría la alambrada de púas y cruzaría los bosques y los campos hasta la estancia de una noche en la granja de los hermanos, y al día siguiente, a la amarilla luz de la mañana, siguiendo el balanceo de pequeños valles y arroyuelos y enjambres de abejas y tomaría el sendero en cuesta que llevaba a la triste casona junto al ferrocarril. Y el árbol. Recoger del barro los andrajos de ropa quemada y rayada, los jirones del pijama y luego descolgarle, al pobre chico pálido, y hacerle un entierro decente. Un chico guapo.”

“Podía hablar de los bosques en invierno, y del siniestro muro de un castillo. ¿Pero cómo hablar de sentimientos?”

“Su intención era bersarle en la mejilla, pero cuando ella se aupó y él se agachó un poco y se acercaron sus caras, él giró la cabeza y sus labios se juntaron. Ella podría haber retrocedido, podría haberse apartado inmediatamente. Pero se entretuvo, indefensa ante la situación. La sensación de una piel sobre la otra no daba ninguna posibilidad de elegir. Si era posible besar castamente de lleno en los labios, fue lo que ella hizo. Un contacto fugaz, pero fue algo más que la idea de un beso…”

“I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible.”

“Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence”

“How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.”

“I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.”

“He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.”

“He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.”

“When a court determines any question with respect to … the upbringing of a child … the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration. ~ Section 1(1) Children Act 1989”

“Ian McEwan: I guess my starting point would be: the brain is responsible for consciousness, and we can be reasonably sure that when that brain ceases to be, when it falls apart and decomposes, that will be the end of us. From that quite a lot of things follow, especially morally. We are the very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness, and we therefore have which one can work towards and maybe make sacrifices, and, crucially, make sacrifices of other people. We have a marvellous gift, and you see it develop in children, this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own and feelings that are just as important as your own, and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.Richard Dawkins: I profoundly agree with you, and I've always felt that one of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.Ian McEwan: And if you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began or what the relationship is between this sky-god and you, it does curtail your curiosity, it cuts off a source of wonder. The loveliness of the world in its wondrousness is not apparent to me in Islam or Christianity and all the other major religions.”

“Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.”

“We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.”

“I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.”

“On a recent Sunday evening, Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small."”

“On the 9/11 hijackers: "Now, I'm an atheist. I really don't believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a God. … It's human, universal, [it's] being able to think our way into the minds of others. As I said at the time, what those holy fools clearly lacked, or clearly were able to deny themselves, was the ability to enter into the minds of the people they were being so cruel to. Amongst their crimes, is, was, a failure of the imagination, of the moral imagination."”

“He had once felt light on the ground. He used to think his life was an open-ended adventure, he used to give things away, it amused him when the unexpected happened, benevolent coincidences used to bear him along. When had all that stopped?”

“We went to a club where singers and stand-up comedians performed in the hope of being discovered. A thin girl with bright red hair and sequined T-shirt reached the end of her passionately murmured song on a sudden shrill, impossible top note. All conversation ceased. Someone, perhaps maliciously, dropped a glass. Halfway through, the note became a warbling vibrato and the singer collapsed on the stage in an abject curtsy, arms held stiffly in front of her, fists clenched. Then she sprang to her tiptoes and held her arms high above her head with the palms flat as if to forestall the sporadic and indifferent applause."They all want to be Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli," George explained as he sucked a giant cocktail through a pink plastic straw. "But no one's looking for that kind of stuff anymore."”

“You want a picture of futility? It's a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long.”

“How can one understand the inner life of a character, real or fictional, without knowing the state of her finances?”

“Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman's clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriétaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, 'Trois. Mari et deux frères,' as he set down their salads.This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”

“Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.”