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.
IRIS MURDOCHWhite magic is black magic. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
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Starting 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.
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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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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.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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An experience is richest not talked of.
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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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We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
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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.
IRIS MURDOCH