The Book & the Movie: Solid Geometry | Ian McEwan / Denis Lawson, 1973-2002
”In the afternoons Maisie used to bring me tea and tell me her nightmares.”
“Your sentimental Buddhism, this junk-shop mysticism, joss-stick therapy, magazine astrology …
none of it is yours, you’ve worked none of it out for yourself. You fell into it, you fell into a swamp
of respectable intuitions. You haven’t the originality or passion to intuit anything yourself beyond
your own unhappiness.”
“‘I’m not trying to make rivers flow straight, I’m trying to get my head straight.’”
”‘You talk like this was a fiction seminar’.”
“Now the positioning of her limbs expressed the breathtaking beauty, the nobility of the human
in its symmetry.”
“As I drew her arms and legs through, Maisie appeared to turn in on herself like a sock….
all that remained was the echo of her question above the deep-blue sheets.”
“I brought my hands together and there was nothing between them, but even when I opened them
again and saw nothing I could not be sure the paper flower had completely gone. An impression
remained, an after-image not on the retina but on the mind itself.”
“‘Dimensionality is a function of consciousness,’ I thought.”
Ian McEwan, Solid Geometry, 1973