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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.

Iris Murdoch

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 MURDOCH

Change Eyes Forever Hands World
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

Black Emotional Lie Strong World
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 MURDOCH

Different Existence Growth Past Present
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
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
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
IRIS MURDOCH

Empty Greatness Life Space
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Art Experience Life Live Right
I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
IRIS MURDOCH

Breathe Emotional Goodness Moments Myself Rule Woman
I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.
IRIS MURDOCH

Alone Existence Imagination Life Myself World
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH

Deep Philosophy Sea Time
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.
IRIS MURDOCH

Body Human Life Mystery Oneself
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
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
IRIS MURDOCH

Born Desire Escape Oneself Violence
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
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
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Lose Person Photograph Poem Sea

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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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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