To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.
IRIS MURDOCHStarting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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I don’t think I can marry, I’m not fit for it, I’m not real enough. That’s the trouble. I’m a puppet that’s realised what’s wrong with itself and it’s horrible. I’m propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I’m propped up crying in a corner.
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Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
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Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
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We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
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Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.
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I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
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As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
IRIS MURDOCH