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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

Iris Murdoch

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
IRIS MURDOCH

Important Rain
Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
IRIS MURDOCH

Man Need Quiet Relationship Woman
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
IRIS MURDOCH

Comfortable Relationship
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH

Beautiful Break Up Fall Forget Love
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
IRIS MURDOCH

Action Future Ourselves Sea
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Education Fundamental Human Literature Understand
Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
IRIS MURDOCH

Determination Eyes Herself Hope
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
IRIS MURDOCH

Live Ourselves Philosophy
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
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
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
I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
IRIS MURDOCH

Different End Feeling Myself
Youth is a marvelous garment.
IRIS MURDOCH

One Liner Youth
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
IRIS MURDOCH

Death Different Pursue See Worth
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
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
IRIS MURDOCH

Darkness Imagination
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
IRIS MURDOCH

Defend Ourselves World
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 feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
IRIS MURDOCH

Fade Feeling Myself Old Photograph
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
Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
IRIS MURDOCH

Love Right Thinking Yourself
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
IRIS MURDOCH

Enjoyment Myself Voice
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
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
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
IRIS MURDOCH

Crime Sin Spiritual
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

Character. Priviledge Fear Myself Passion People Thinking
Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH

Difficult Love Oneself Reality

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

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