Crystale > Crystale's Quotes

“I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“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, Nuns and Soldiers

“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 Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real”
― Iris Murdoch

“T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right.”
― Iris Murdoch

“...морето пред мен по-скоро свети, отколкото искри под ласкавото майско слънце. Със започването на прилива то кротко се обляга на сушата, почти необезпокоявано от гънките на вълни или пяна. Там нейде при хоризонта цветът му е разточително лилав, равномерно набразден с ивици смарагдово зелено. Самият хоризонт е виолетов. Близо до брега, където зрението ми се ограничава от надигащите се грамади гърбати жълти скали, има лента от по-бледозелено, ледена и бистра, не така сияйна, матова, а не прозрачна. Намираме се на север и ярките слънчеви лъчи не могат да проникнат в морето. Досами брега водата нежно облива скалите и повърхностният слой все още има цвят. Безоблачното небе е много бледо при виолетовият хоризонт и му придава леки сребристи отблясъци. Там, където морето и небето се сливат, синьото сгъстява боята си и пулсира. Но небето изглежда студено. Дори слънцето изглежда студено.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.”
― Iris Murdoch

“I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen”
― Rita Rudner

“Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women

“There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”
― Alexander Von Humboldt

“Die gefährlichste Weltanschauung ist die Weltanschauung derer, die die Welt nie angeschaut haben. (The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world)”
― Alexander von Humboldt