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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.

Iris Murdoch

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH

Difficult Love Oneself Reality
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Escape Life Love Talk Value
Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.
IRIS MURDOCH

Fear Fundamental Human Marriage Nature
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
IRIS MURDOCH

Food God Important Reading Thinking
Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
IRIS MURDOCH

Enough Love Rare Wasted
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

Greatness Human Race
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
IRIS MURDOCH

Death Live Moments Spirit Time
This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
IRIS MURDOCH

Heart Quiet See
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Moral Need Philosophy Politics
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
IRIS MURDOCH

Greatness Past Truth Word
I have nobody in the world. I’ll kill myself. That’s best. Everyone will say, It’s for the best that she killed herself, she’s better off dead. I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it.
IRIS MURDOCH

Best Hate Kill Myself Pain World
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
IRIS MURDOCH

Amazing Commitment Marriage Oneself Writing
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
IRIS MURDOCH

Better Happiness Life Oneself Quick Secret
Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
IRIS MURDOCH

Courage Failure Hide Literature Moral Smile
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 MURDOCH

Connection Important Kind Language Reading Writing
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
IRIS MURDOCH

Myself Need Silence Soul World

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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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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Popular Authors

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