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 MURDOCHCoffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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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Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.
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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.
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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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White 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.
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Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
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Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
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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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What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
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Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
IRIS MURDOCH