But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
IRIS MURDOCHPeople have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
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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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One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
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An experience is richest not talked of.
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Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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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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Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
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Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
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What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
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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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People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
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There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
IRIS MURDOCH