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 MURDOCHGuilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
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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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One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
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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 -
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 -
I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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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 -
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 -
Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
IRIS MURDOCH