I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
IRIS MURDOCHWe 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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.
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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.
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Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
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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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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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Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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That doesn’t sound like you, you ride every wave. There is one that will drown me
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
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People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.
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We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
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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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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 -
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
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How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
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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.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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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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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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
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For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
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An experience is richest not talked of.
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Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
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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.
IRIS MURDOCH