Amsterdam Ian Mcewan Quotes

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

Was it boredom or sadism that made the shirt service people do up every single button?

He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy

and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere.

Each day he made attempts … but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free of its own idiom, its own authority, to offer the element of surprise that would be the guarantee of originality.

Thing is, we could discuss it out loud in front of the gentlemen over there, or you could get off my case and make a pleasant farewell. That is to say, fuck off.

Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

When she found a place of her own and packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear, "He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she’s there all day.

He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future.

Then, with an extended, falling glissando of disgust, the whole string section, plus flutes and piccolo, surged toward the brass, leaving the music critic and his deed - an early evening frites and mayonnaise on Oude Hoogstraat - illuminated under a lonely chandelier.

It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.

The following day the editor presided over a sudued meeting with his senior staff. Tony Montano sat to one side, a silent observer. "It's time we ran more regular columns. They're cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much. You've seen that sort of thing. Goes to a party and can't remember anyone's name. Twelve hundred words." "Sort of naval gazing," Jeremy Ball suggested. "Not quite. Gazing is too intellectual. More like naval chat.

The quiet gravity really wasn't his style at all, which had always been both needy and dour; anxious to be liked, but incapable of taking friendliness for granted. A burden of the hugely rich.

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity which was best dealt with by their parting without another word.

Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her underwear tumbling from drawers she never closed, a big ironing board that was never folded away, and in the one overfilled wardrobe dresses , crushed and shouldering sideways like commuters on the metro. Magazines, makeup, bank statements, bead necklaces, flowers, knickers, ashtrays, invitations, tampons, LPs, airplane tickets, high heeled shoes- not a single surface was left uncovered by something of Molly's, so that when Vernon was meant to be working at home, he took to writing in a cafe along the street. And yet each morning she arose fresh from the shell of this girly squalor, like a Botticelli Venus, to present herself, not naked, of course, but sleekly groomed, at the offices of Paris Vogue.

In some respect Journalism is like science, the best ideas were one that survived and strengthened by opposition.

This sense of absence had been growing since Molly’s funeral. It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.

In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was- square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it, and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic.

Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do.

And perhaps that was typical of a certain . . . imbalance in their friendship that had always been there and which Clive had been aware of somewhere in his heart and had always pushed away, disliking himself for unworthy thoughts. Until now.

...but hearing and seeing only the bright hurry-gurdy carousel os his twirling thoughts, and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage! And what about Molly....?

Celor ce nu-și pot lua gândul de la o nedreptate li se întâmplă uneori să suprapună, în minte, dorința de revanșă cu sentimentul unei obligații morale.

When it comes to being reasonable, they rather go over the top.

But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine

And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born.

The money to buy even the cheapest of these things had been earned by Clive dreaming up sounds, by putting one note in front of another. He had imagined everything here, he had willed it all to be here, without anyone’s help.

His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.

Once he had found his seat he removed his shoe and discovered a flattened black mass of chewing gum embedded deep in the zigzag tread of the sole. Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting, and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct. How appalling, the intimate contact with the contents of a stranger’s mouth, the bottomless vulgarity of people who chewed gum and who let it fall from their lips where they stood.

This sense of absence had been growing ... It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken besides his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity...He was widely known as man without edges, without faults or virtues a man who did not fully exist.

Hát még a szimfóniák - erőtlen zengzetek, durrogtatás, hamvába holt kísérlet, hogy hangokból hegyet hordjunk össze. Szenvedélyes küzdelem. És miért? A pénzért. A tiszteletért. A halhatatlanságért. Hogy tagadjuk a véletlenszerűséget, mely világra hozott bennünket, és távol tartsuk a halálfélelmet.

He turned out the lamps and walked down to his bedroom. He had no preliminary sketch of an idea, not a scrap, not even a hunch, and he would not find it by sitting at the piano and frowning hard. It could come only in its own time. He knew from experience that the best he could do was relax, step back,

Soon human meaning would be bleached from the rocks, the landscape would assume its beauty and draw him in; the unimaginable age of the mountains and the fine mesh of living things that lay across them would remind him that he was part of this order and insignificant within it, and he would be set free.

...when Clive stood from the piano and shuffled to the doorway to turn out the studio lights, and looked back at the rich, the beautiful chaos that surrounded his toils, and had once more a passing thought, the minuscule fragment of a suspicion that he would not have shared with a single person in the world, would not even have committed to his journal and whose key word he shaped in his mind only with reluctance ; the thought was, quite simply, that it might not be going too far to say that he was... a genius. A genius. Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips.

It would have been possible to back out of his engagements by assuming the license of the free artistic spirit, but he loathed such arrogance. He had a number of friends who played the genius card when it suited, failing to show up to this or that in the belief that whatever local upset it caused, it could only increase respect for the compelling nature of their high calling. These types — novelists were by far the worst — managed to convince friends and families that not only their working hours, but every nap and stroll, every fit of silence, depression of drunkenness bore the exculpatory ticket of high intent.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage. As with words, so with sentences.

But Clive stared at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.

Wie wohlhabend, wie einflussreich sie waren, wie sie prosperiert hatten unter einer Regierung, die sie beinahe siebzehn Jahre lang verachtet hatten! Talking ‚bout my generation. Diese Tatkraft, dieser unverschämte Dusel! Im Sozialstaat der Nachkriegszeit genährt von Milch und Honig des Staates, danach verwöhnt vom zaghaft-unschuldigen Wohlstand ihrer Eltern, mündig dann in einer Zeit der Vollbeschäftigung mit neuen Universitäten und bunten Taschentüchern, dem augusteischen Zeitalter des Rock ‚n’ Roll, der erschwinglichen Ideale. Als die Leiter hinter ihnen bröckelte, als der Staat seine Zitzen verweigerte und zum Hausdrachen wurde, saßen sie schon im trockenen, konsolidierten sich und ließen sich häusliche nieder, um dieses oder jenes zu bilden – Geschmack, Meinungen, Vermögen.

Cât de puțin ne cunoaștem unii pe alții! Ca soiurile de gheață, ființele noastre plutesc în mare parte sub nivelul apei, iar sinele nostru social, vizibil, proiectează exclusiv albul și răceala. Or, iată aici o vedere rară sub unde, o imagine a agitației intime a unei ființe omenești a cărei demnitate a fost dată peste cap de irezistibila nevoie de fantezie pură, de gând pur, dată peste cap de elementul uman ireductibil - mintea.

(...) [H]e removed his shoe and discovered a flattened black mass of chewing gum embedded deep in the zig-zag tread of the sole. Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct. How appalling, the intimate contact with the contents of a stranger's mouth, the bottomless vulgarity of people who chewed gum and who let it fall from their lips where they stood.

He turned out the lamps and walked down to his bedroom. He had no preliminary sketch of an idea, not a scrap, not even a hunch, and he would not find it by sitting at the piano and frowning hard. It could come only in its own time. He knew from experience that the best he could do was relax, step back, while remaining alert and receptive. He would have to take a long walk in the country, or even a series of long walks. He needed mountains, big skies. The Lake District, perhaps. The best ideas caught him by surprise at the end of twenty miles, when his mind was elsewhere. In bed at last, lying on his back in total darkness, taut, resonating from mental effort, he saw jagged rods of primary color streak across his retina, then fold and writhe into sunbursts.

Este era o ataque. A apologia tomava emprestado e distorcia o velho estratagema do Eclesiastes: era tempo de resgatar a música das mão dos “donos daa verdade”, e era tempo de reafirmar a comunicabilidade essencial da música, que havia sido forjada, na Europa, numa tradição humanista que sempre reconhecera o enigma da natureza humana; era tempo de aceitar que uma execução para o público constituía uma “comunhão laica”, e era tempo de reconhecer a primazia do ritmo e do tom, bem como a natureza básica da melodia. Para que isso acontecesse sem apenas repetir a música do passado, cumpria formular uma definição contemporânea de beleza, o que, por sua vez, era impossível sem que se compreendesse uma “verdade fundamental”. Nesse ponto, Clive se valeu ousadamente de alguns ensaios inéditos e altamente especulativos de um colega de Noam Chomsky, que ele tinha lido quando passara férias na casa do autor, em Cape Cod: nossa capacidade de “ler” ritmos, melodias e harmonias agradáveis, assim como a faculdade exclusivamente humana da linguagem, era geneticamente determinada. Segundo os antropólogos, esses três elementos deviam existir em todas as culturas musicais. Nosso ouvido para harmonia era inato. (Além disso, sem um contexto envolvente de harmonia, a dissonância não fazia sentido e se tornava desinteressante.) Compreender uma linha melódica era um ato mental complexo, mas passível de ser executado até por uma criança bem pequena; já nascíamos com uma herança, éramos o Homo musicas; portanto, definir a beleza na música implicava uma definição da natureza humana, o que nos trazia de volta às humanidades e à capacidade de comunicação…

Лучшие идеи - те, которые выживают и укрепляются в столкновении с умной оппозицией.