On chesil beach Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Book: On Chesil Beach
Quotes of Book: On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
The conversation had turned again to those moments, by now enriched by a private mythology, when they first set eyes on each other
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
He was discovering that being in love was not a steady state, but a matter of fresh surges or waves, and he was experiencing one now.
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back."
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
It's shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum's sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush?
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
His anger stirred her own and she suddenly thought she understood their problem: they were too polite, too constrained, too timorous, they went around each other on tiptoes, murmuring, whispering, deferring, agreeing. They barely knew each other and never could because of the blanket of companionable near-silence that smothered their differences and blinded them as much as it bound them.
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
She knew very well that people fell out, even stormily, and then made up. But she did not know how to start - she simply did not have the trick of it, the row that cleared the air, and could never quite believe that hard words could be unsaid or forgotten.
book-quote silence not-saying
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her.
book-quote kissing
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken
book-quote on-chesil-beach
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
book-quote
Ian McEwan _ On Chesil Beach
When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.
book-quote marriage