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She Wanted To Leave, She Wanted To Lie Alone Face Down On Her Bed And Savor The Vile Piquancy Of The Moment, And Go Back Down The Lines Of Branching Consequences To The Point Before The Destruction Began. She Needed To Contemplate With Eyes Closed The Full Richness Of What She Had Lost, What She Had Given Away, And To Anticipate The New Regime.

-Ian Mcewan

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She Wanted To Leave,

Ian Mcewan

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She Wanted To Leave, She Wanted To Lie Alone Face Down On Her Bed And Savor The Vile Piquancy Of The Moment, And Go Back Down The Lines Of Branching Consequences To The Point Before The Destruction Began. She Needed To Contemplate With Eyes Closed The Full Richness Of What She Had Lost, What She Had Given Away, And To Anticipate The New Regime.

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Inevitable Death

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Terrorist Groups

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He Never Believed In Fate Or Providence, Or The Future Being Made By Someone In The Sky. Instead, At Every Instant, A Trillion Trillion Possible Futures; The Pickiness Of Pure Chance And Physical Laws Seemed Like Freedom From The Scheming Of A Gloomy God.

My Needs Were Simple I Didn't Bother Much With Themes Or Felicitous Phrases And Skipped Fine Descriptions Of Weather, Landscapes And Interiors. I Wanted Characters I Could Believe In, And I Wanted To Be Made Curious About What Was To Happen To Them. Generally, I Preferred People To Be Falling In And Out Of Love, But I Didn't Mind So Much If They Tried Their Hand At Something Else. It Was Vulgar To Want It, But I Liked Someone To Say 'marry Me' By The End.

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I Couldn't Think About Novels At All. It Seemed The Only Writing That Was Appropriate To That Horrendous Event Was Journalism, Reportage. And, In Fact, I Think The Profession Rose Quite Honorably To The Task. Novelists Require A Slower Turnover, I Mean, In Time.

My Biggest Fear, I Think Falling From A Great Height. If I Want To Keep Myself Awake At Night I Imagine I'm On The Top Of The North Or South Tower In 9/11, Wondering Whether I'm Going To Be Burnt To Death Or I'm Going To Jump. And I Think I Would Burn To Death. And Yet I'm Impressed By The Fact That Hundreds Didn't.

Not Everything People Did Could Be In A Correct, Logical Order, Especially When They Were Alone.

It Is Photography Itself That Creates The Illusion Of Innocence. Its Ironies Of Frozen Narrative Lend To Its Subjects An Apparent Unawareness That They Will Change Or Die. It Is The Future They Are Innocent Of. Fifty Years On We Look At Them With The Godly Knowledge Of How They Turne Dout After All - Who They Married, The Date Of Their Death - With No Thought For Who Will One Day Be Holding Photographs Of Us.

How Easily This Unthinking Family Love Was Forgotten.

Without A Revolution Of The Inner Life, However Slow, All Our Big Designs Are Worthless. The Work We Have To Do Is With Ourselves If We're Ever Going To Be At Peace With Each Other...the Good That Flows From It Will Shape Our Societies In An Unprogrammed, Unforeseen Way, Under The Control Of No Single Group Of People Or Set Of Ideas.

What Can It Be About Low Temperatures That Sharpens The Edges Of Objects?

If Life Was A Dream, Then Dying Must Be The Moment When You Woke Up. It Was So Simple It Must Be True. You Died, The Dream Was Over, You Woke Up. That's What People Meant When They Talked About Going To Heaven. It Was Like Waking Up.

Finally, You Had To Measure Yourself By Other People - There Really Was Nothing Else. Every Now And Then, Quite Unintentionally, Someone Taught You Something About Yourself.

There Are Ways In Which Art Can Have A Longer Reach Than Politics.

He Would Work Through The Night And Sleep Until Lunch. There Wasn't Really Much Else To Do. Make Something, And Die.

Who You Get, And How It Works Out - There's So Much Luck Involved, As Well As The Million Branching Consequences Of Your Conscious Choice Of A Mate, That No One And No Amount Of Talking Can Untangle It If It Turns Out Unhappily.

No Emergency Was Ever Dealt With Effectively By Democratic Process.

Love Doesn't Grow At A Steady Rate, But Advances In Surges, Bolts, Wild Leaps, And This Was One Of Those.

I Turned The Pages So Fast. And I Suppose I Was, In My Mindless Way, Looking For A Something, Version Of Myself, A Heroine I Could Slip Inside As One Might A Pair Of Favourite Shoes.

At That Moment, The Urge To Be Writing Was Stronger Than Any Notion She Had Of What She Might Write.

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The Cost Of Oblivius Daydreaming Was Always This Moment Of Return, The Realigment With What Had Been Before And Now Seemed A Little Worse. Her Reverie, Once Rich In Plausible Details, Had Become A Passing Silliness Before The Hard Mass Of The Actual. It Was Difficult To Come Back.

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Watching Him During The First Several Minutes Of His Delivery, Cecilia Felt A Pleasant Sinking Sensation In Her Stomach As She Contemplated How Deliciously Self-destructive It Would Be, Almost Erotic, To Be Married To A Man So Nearly Handsome, So Hugely Rich, So Unfathomably Stupid. He Would Fill Her With His Big-faced Children, All Of Them Loud, Boneheaded Boys With A Passion For Guns And Football And Aeroplanes.

For The Professors In The Academy, For The Humanities Generally, Misery Is More Amenable To Analysis: Happiness Is A Harder Nut To Crack.

It Was Always The View Of My Parents...that Hot Weather Encouraged Loose Morals Among Young People.

He's Never Quite Got The Trick Of Conversation, Tending To Hear In Dissenting Views, However Mild, A Kind Of Affront, An Invitation To Mortal Combat.

Above All, She Wanted To Look As Though She Had Not Given The Matter A Moment's Thought, And That Would Take Time.

I Like To Think That Each Book I Start Is A Completely New Departure But I’ve Learned That Whatever You Do, Readers Will Have No Difficulty Assimilating It Into What You’ve Done Before.

The World Should Take Note: Not Everything Is Getting Worse.

Not Being Boring Is Quite A Challenge.

It Wasn't Only Wickedness And Scheming That Made People Unhappy, It Was Confusion And Misunderstanding; Above All, It Was The Failure To Grasp The Simple Truth That Other People Are As Real As You.

Let His Name Be Cleared And Everyone Else Adjust Their Thinking. He Had Put In Time, Now They Must Do The Work. His Business Was Simple. Find Cecilia And Love Her, Marry Her And Live Without Shame.

I’ll Wait For You. Come Back. The Words Were Not Meaningless, But They Didn’t Touch Him Now. It Was Clear Enough - One Person Waiting For Another Was Like An Arithmetical Sum, And Just As Empty Of Emotion. Waiting. Simply One Person Doing Nothing, Over Time, While Another Approached. Waiting Was A Heavy Word.

One Important Theme Is The Extent To Which One Can Ever Correct An Error, Especially Outside Any Frame Of Religious Forgiveness. All Of Us Have Done Something We Regret - How We Manage To Remove That From Our Conscience, Or Whether That's Even Possible, Interested Me.

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.

It Troubles Him To Consider The Powerful Currents And Fine-tuning That Alter Fate, The Close And Distant Influences, The Accidents Of Character And Circumstance.

But How To Do Feelings? All Very Well To Write "she Felt Sad", Or Describe What A Sad Person Might Do, But What Of Sadness Itself, How Was That Put Across So It Could Be Felt In All Its Lowering Immediacy? Even Harder Was The Threat, Or The Confusion Of Feeling Contradictory Things.

The Anticipation And Dread He Felt At Seeing Her Was Also A Kind Of Sensual Pleasure, And Surrounding It, Like An Embrace, Was A General Elation--it Might Hurt, It Was Horribly Inconvenient, No Good Might Come Of It, But He Had Found Out For Himself What It Was To Be In Love, And It Thrilled Him.

Self-consciousness Is The Destroyer Of Erotic Joy.

How Can A Novelist Achieve Atonement When, With Her Absolute Power Of Deciding Outcomes, She Is Also God? There Is No One, No Entity Or Higher Form That She Can Appeal To, Or Be Reconciled With, Or That Can Forgive Her. There Is Nothing Outside Her. In Her Imagination She Has Set The Limits And The Terms. No Atonement For God, Or Novelists, Even If They Are Atheists. It Was Always An Impossible Task, And That Was Precisely The Point. The Attempt Was All.

Oh, I've Become Immune To The Booker. I Think We Need Something A Little More Like The Pulitzer Prize, Where There Isn't This Great Race.

There Did Not Have To Be A Moral. She Need Only Show Separate Minds, As Alive As Her Own, Struggling With The Idea That Other Minds Were Equally Alive. It Wasn't Only Wickedness And Scheming That Made People Unhappy, It Was Confusion And Misunderstanding, Above All, It Was The Failure To Grasp The Simple Truth That Other People Are As Real As You. And Only In A Story Could You Enter These Different Minds And Show How They Had An Equal Value. That Was The Only Moral A Story Need Have.

At The Back Of My Mind I Had A Sense Of Us Sitting About Waiting For Some Terrible Event, And Then I Would Remember That It Had Already Happened.

Terrible Events

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