Frasi di Iris Murdoch

pagina 2

“Noi viviamo in un mondo di fantasie e illusioni. Il nostro compito più arduo è trovare la realtà.”

“Forse quando persone distanti su altri pianeti raccolgono alcune delle nostre lunghezze d'onde, tutto quel che sentono è un continuo strillare.”

“[Su Elias Canetti] È come un personaggio che è famoso senza che si sappia esattamente perché.”

“Gli svantaggi spirituali del matrimonio t'invalidano per la vita.”

“Qualche volta mi dico che le donne sono la radice prima di ogni male.”

“Non esiste penitenza, perché quel particolare soffrire è consolazione. Non si ha bisogno di sofferenza, ma di verità; e la verità sarebbe una specie di sofferenza nuova e inimmaginabile.”

“La passione trova in se stessa le proprie giustificazioni.”

“Quasi tutto ciò che ci consola è un falso.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.”

“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.”

“youth is a marvelous garment”

“The chief requirement of the good life… is to live without any image of oneself.”

“But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.”

“Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.”

“Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.”

“All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.”

“Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.”

“The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.”

“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”

“We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.”

“Only lies and evil come from letting people off.”

“The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.”

“Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.”

“He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.”

“I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.”

“I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”

“The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.”

“All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.”

“Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.”

“A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”

“The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.”

“The cry of equality pulls everyone down.”

“Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)”

“Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.”

“To eat, teeth must meet.”