Lessons
Ian McEwan
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid”
“His accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.”
“things will never be as good as we hoped or as bad as we feared.”
“His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover.”
“Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.”
“By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?”
“he went back upstairs to stare at himself in the bathroom mirror. Who was he? Captain of the second fifteen? An abject housebound halfwit in his pyjamas? He didn’t know.”
“Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.”
“How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He”
“Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.”
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Book Keywords:
books, fate, history, reading
