Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
IRIS MURDOCHTo 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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
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The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
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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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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’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.
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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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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
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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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Anything that consoles is fake.
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Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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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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What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH