Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
We can only learn to love by loving.
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?
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.
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
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.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
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.
Anything that consoles is fake.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
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.
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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.
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.
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
Youth is a marvelous garment
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
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(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')
Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)
Thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you.
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.
White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship...
I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.
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.
This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate.
Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.
An experience is richest not talked of.
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off.
Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations.
We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
When I'm up to something I find it very hard to realize that I probably look no different from the way I look on other occasions.
You know what. You've killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don't come for me, I'll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.
But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable.
You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptiness. And of this you make a virtue.
The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.
How mysterious night and day are, this endless procession off dark and light....I think such sad thoughts - of people in trouble and afraid, all lonely people all prisoners.
He dreamt...he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.
I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.
There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off.
Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that.
The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains.
Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.
Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
