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Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes

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Famous Iris Murdoch Quotes

“But all this, all this shift and change, thought Bellamy, is part of the vast lie which surrounds me and wherein I move from one fantasy to another. I wanted to escape to solitude and darkness in a holy place, but the dark is just the old dark of meaninglessness and falsehood, which separates me from my friends and from the real world where people love and help each other.”

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Book:The Green Knight
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“Rainborough wished that there was some way of becoming intimate with a woman which did not involve these agonizing moments of irrevocable decision. It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish—graceful, mysterious, desirable and free—and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.”

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Book:The flight from the enchanter
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“When Louise returned to the Aviary the others were playing the game of what character in fiction Peter Mir reminded them of. 'I think he's Mr Pickwick,' said Louise. 'Oh no! Never!' said Sefton. 'I think he's more like Prospero.' 'I think he's the Green Knight,' said Aleph. 'Come on, Moy, what do you think?' 'I think he's the Minotaur.' 'The Minotaur isn't a literary character, he's a mythical character,' Sefton objected. 'Oh really — !' 'What does Clement think?' said Aleph. 'I think he's Mephistopheles,' said Clement. 'Surely not, he's so nice!' said Louise.”

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Book:The Green Knight
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“—Hasta cierto punto estoy de acuerdo contigo —dijo Rupert— pero... —No hay “peros”, querido amigo, Kant nos mostró de modo concluyente que no podemos conocer la realidad. Sin embargo, seguimos creyendo obstinadamente que sí podemos. —¡Kant creía que tenemos atisbos de ella! ¡Eso era precisamente en lo que insistía! —Kant era estúpidamente cristiano. Y también nosotros lo somos, aunque lo neguemos. El cristianismo es una de las más grandiosas y brillantes fuentes de ilusión que la raza humana ha inventado.”

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Book:A Fairly Honourable Defeat
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“There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on. I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already 'done' them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history. Whole novels existed only in their titles.”

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Book:The Black Prince
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