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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| eb849d5 | Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them. | good morality | Iris Murdoch | |
| 7c888ae | The whole extraordinary business was over. And I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold without a coat. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| c777762 | It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| ffec797 | There are special nightmares for the daytime sleeper: little nervous dreams tossed into some brief restless moments of unconsciousness and breaking through the surface of the mind to become confused at once with the horror of some waking vision. Such are these awakenings, like an awakening in the grave, when one opens one's eyes, stretched out rigid with clenched hands, waiting for some misery to declare itself; but for a long time it lies .. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 026e08b | Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror... | novel | Iris Murdoch | |
| 1a3746f | The next day round about ten o'clock I was walking down Welbeck Street. I was in a bad temper. By daylight the whole project seemed very much less attractive. I felt that to be snubbed by a film star would put me in a bad state of mind for months. But I regarded the matter as something which had been decided and which now simply had to be carried out. I often used this method for deciding difficult cases. In stage one I entertain the thing .. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| dba243c | The next day round about ten o'clock I was walking down Welbeck Street. I was in a bad temper. By daylight the whole project seemed very much less attractive. I felt that to be snubbed by a film star would put me in a bad state of mind for months. But I regarded the matter as something which had been decided and which now simply had to be carried out. I often use this method for deciding difficult cases. In stage one I entertain the thing p.. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 3c9fb66 | But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell. | growth suffering | Iris Murdoch | |
| b1f1c8d | Patchway had the enviable countryman's capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 5d70777 | Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, an.. | iris-murdoch memory meta reality story the-past the-sea-the-sea | Iris Murdoch | |
| 3588d57 | The notion that 'it all somehow must make sense', or 'there is a best decision here', preserves from despair: the difficulty is how to entertain this consoling notion in a way which is not false. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| a4a21fc | I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present. | drama illusion literature subterfuge | Iris Murdoch | |
| d735a9c | Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people - inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families - but these cases are also the least illuminating. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| d161f97 | A less courageous person would have felt that it was too late, they would have felt ashamed, they would think wellI don't want this, I know I shall hate it, it's all wrong, but I'm so involved now I'll have to put up with it, and I know that later on I'll keep on wishing that I'd had the nerve to say no, even at the last minute.... | Iris Murdoch | ||
| dffe197 | Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 5e579a5 | The true rose, the miracle of nature, owed nothing to the hand of man. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| d5996ed | But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| ab189fa | But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out. | commitment description iris-murdoch love stars the-sea-the-sea unconditional-love | Iris Murdoch | |
| 7411204 | El sexo es un invento absurdo que a pesar de serlo no aspira mas que hincharse y penetrar. Se supone que tiene algo que ver con el amor, por lo menos esa es su leyenda, pero el amor es un mito estimulante y aunque no lo fuese no podria tener relacion alguna con el sexo. No mezclamos el amor con la comida, ?verdad? Ni con el hipo o sonarse la nariz. ?Y con la respiracion? o con la circulacion de la sangre o el funcionamiento del higado. Ento.. | boca impulso penetrar personas sexo | Iris Murdoch | |
| bd56478 | The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| c75b14b | We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 2e5bd6b | He was not notably vertebrate and could hardly look after himself, so how could he look after Crystal? | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 5174714 | Dora watched him for a while, nervously, and then returned to scanning the whole group. Seeing them all together like that she felt excluded and aggressive, and Noel's exhortations came back to her. They had a secure complacent look about them: the spiritual ruling class; and she wished suddenly that she might grow as large and fierce as a gorilla and shake the flimsy doors off their hinges, drowning the repulsive music in a savage carnivor.. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 1386310 | You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all. | the-sea-the-sea unreal | Iris Murdoch | |
| 7356b05 | It's not so easy." "What isn't?" "To establish relationships, you can't just elect people, it can't be done by thinking and willing." | dialogue iris-murdoch relationships the-sea-the-sea | Iris Murdoch | |
| 0886c53 | I have no close friends, that is, no friends. | friendless friends iris-murdoch isolated lonely the-green-knight | Iris Murdoch | |
| c7b6c0c | As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you? | iris-murdoch morbid mortality the-sea-the-sea | Iris Murdoch | |
| 30de487 | He could feel the pain of her heart beating strongly against his own. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 2b4a2f4 | He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 7536c89 | Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 25bab98 | She has somehow missed the bus of life. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| e0209fd | How absolute the knave is! | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 267eb88 | So was she on the side of dragons and indifferent to the fate of princesses? | fairy-tales iris-murdoch princesses the-green-knight tropes | Iris Murdoch | |
| 57fbc06 | Where's your house?' 'Kempsford Gardens, by West Brompton tube station. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| f8cec30 | but it was love in an inferno: that terrible relentless withholding of forgiveness. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| e018b0e | If only he could be loved by somebody new. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| b9f3d6b | Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet." "Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end." "So the critics are just stupid?" "It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can." | Iris Murdoch | ||
| d9c4744 | It's all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it's all too hard. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 85e72cf | All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes | Iris Murdoch | ||
| f73bedf | Sometimes he would have liked to pray, but what is prayer if there is nobody there? | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 6d5fba1 | But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| da1dfbd | Brooding about the past is so often fantasy of how one might have won and resentment that one didn't. It is that resentment which one so often mistakes for repentance | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 93683ce | But, and especially with Linda's help, he had decided that, like most other people, he was not made for reality. | Iris Murdoch | ||
| 6f2422b | Our planet is a freak which we shall destroy by our own wicked senseless activities in the next century. Our history will very soon come to an end. Now that God is dead, we are at last presented with the truth, yes, the truth remains, but it is on a short lead. Anyway, we are nothing and it matters not what we do. | doomsday end-of-the-world iris-murdoch meaningless nihilism pessimistic the-green-knight | Iris Murdoch |