Author: Ian McEwan

Cites

• Jane Austen (1)
  • IN: Atonement (2001) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpretrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literaty intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting? They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
    FROM: Northanger Abbey, (1817), Novel, UK
• Saul Bellow (1)
  • IN: Saturday (2005) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.
    FROM: Herzog, (1964), Novel, Canada
• Timothy Garton Ash (1)
  • IN: Sweet Tooth (2012) Fiction, Spy, British
    EPIGRAPH: If only I had met, on this searc, a single clearly evil person.
    FROM: The File, (1997), Book, UK
• Franz Kafka (1)
  • IN: The Innocent (1990) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: My labours on the Castle Keep were also made harder, and unnecessarily so (unecessarily in that the burrow derived no real benefit from those labours) by the fact that just at the place where, according to my calculations, the Castle Keep should be, the soil was very loose and sandy and had literally to be hammered vaulted chamber. But for such tasks, the only tool I possess is my forehead. So I had to run with my forehead thousands and thousands of times, for whole days and nightsm against the ground, and I was glad when the blood came, for that was a proof that the walls were beginning to harden; and in that way, as everybody must admit, I richly paid for my Castle Keep.
    FROM: The Burrow (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir), (1933), Short story, Czech Republic
• John Colville (1)
  • IN: The Innocent (1990) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: After dinner we saw an amusing film: Bob Hope in The Princess and the Pirate. Then we sat in the Great Hall and listened to The Mikado played, much too slowly, on the gramophone. The PM said it brought back "the Victorian era, eighty years which will rank in our island history with the Antonine age." Now, however, "the shadows of victory" were upon us.... After this war, continued the PM, we should be weak, we should have no money and no strength and we should lie between the two great powers of the USA and the USSR.
    FROM: The Fringes of Power: Ten Downing Street Diaries, (1985), Book, UK
• NULL (2)
  • IN: The Children Act (2014) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: 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.
    FROM: Section 1(a), the Children Act, (1989), Legal Document, UK
  • IN: The Child in Time (1987) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: ...and for those parents, for too many years misguided by the pallid relativism of self-appointed childcare experts...
    FROM: The Authorised Childcare Handbook, HMSO, (1987), Fictional, UK
• Marsilio Ficino (1)
  • IN: black dogs (1992) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.
    FROM: letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, (1475), Letter, Italy
• W. H. Auden (1)
  • IN: Amsterdam (1998) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: The friends who met here and embraced are gone, / Each to his own mistake
    FROM: The Crossroads in "The Quest", (1941), Poem, UK
• William Shakespeare (1)
  • IN: Nutshell (2016) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space -- were it not that I have bad dreams.
    FROM: Hamlet, (1603), Play, UK
• John Updike (1)
  • IN: Solar (2010) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: It gives him great pleasure, makes Rabbit feel rich, to contemplate the world's wasting, to know the earth is mortal too.
    FROM: Rabbit is Rich, (1981), Novel, US
• Adrienne Rich (1)
  • IN: The Comfort of Strangers (1981) Novel, British
    EPIGRAPH: how we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons
    FROM: Sibling Mysteries, (1977), Poem, US
• Cesare Pavese (1)
  • IN: The Comfort of Strangers (1981) Novel, British
    EPIGRAPH: Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, Italy

Cited by

• Marcus Sakey (1)
  • IN: The Amateurs (2009) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: There was something seriously wrong with the world for which neither God nor His absence could be blamed.
    FROM: Amsterdam, (1998), Novel, UK