Self consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.

(102)

 

Bad at arguments

She is especially bad at arguments. She has never been able to accept the rules of engagement which permit or require you to say things that you do not mean, or are distorted truths, or not true at all. She can’t help feeling that every hostile utterance of hers takes her further not only from Joe’s love, but from all the love she’s ever had, and makes her feel that a buried meanness has been exposed that truly represents her.

(86)

 

It’s possible to ask to be left alone

Theirs is the kind of relationship in which it is perfectly possible to ask to be left alone without incurring consequences, but his intensity is inhibiting her.

(83)

 

Untangling a relationship

Who you get, and how it works out – there’s so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

(82)

 

The experience of love

However much I thought about Clarissa, in memory or in anticipation, experiencing her again, the feel and sound of her, the precise quality of love that ran between us, the very animal presence, always brought, along with the familiarity, a jolt of surprise.

(52)

 

Watching the news

To calm myself I turned to that evening clinic of referred pain, the TV news. Tonight, a mass grave in a wood in central Bosnia, a cancerous government minister with a love-nest, the second day of a murder trial. What soothed me was the format’s familiarity: the war-beat music, the smooth and urgent tones of the presenter, the easeful truth that all misery was relative, then the final opiate, the weather.

(46)

 

A pointless death

Logan’s death was pointless – that was part of the reason we were in shock. Good people sometimes suffered and died, not because their goodness was being tested, but precisely because there was nothing, no one, to test it. No one but us.

- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love 32

 

Starting position

So much followed from this incident, so much branching and subdivision began in those early moments, such pathways of love and hatred blazed from this starting position, that a little reflection, even pedantry, can only help me here. The best description of a reality does not need to mimic its velocity.

- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love: 17.