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Book: Nutshell
Quotes of Book: Nutshell
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  1. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness...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...God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.
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  2. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    So here I am, upside down in a woman.
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  3. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.
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  4. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.
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  5. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    Not everyone knows what it is to have your father's rival's penis inches from your nose.
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  6. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There'll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It's a reversion to constant, visceral fear.
    book-quoterevengemaths

  7. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    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.
    book-quotelovetruthmarriage

  8. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    We've built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It's dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed.
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  9. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.
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  10. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation."
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  11. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    But even I know that love doesn't steer by logic, nor is power distributed evenly. Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as wells as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. Memories are poor for past failures. Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not. So do the laws of inheritance that bind a personality. The lovers don't know there's no free will. I haven't heard enough radio drama to know more than that, though pop songs have taught me that they don't feel in December what they felt in May, and that to have a womb may be incomprehensible to those who don't and that the reverse is also true.
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  12. Ian McEwan _ Nutshell

    No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.
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