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A Severed Head

Iris Murdoch

Top 10 Best Quotes

“I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.”

“To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.”

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

“This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...”

“I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.”

“Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.”

“There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage.”

“The trouble with people nowadays is they don't know how to do nothing.”

“I could not see other human beings at present.”

“I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?”

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Book Keywords:

inactivity, youth, inevitable, surreal, limbo, love, world-weary, recluse, alone, on-the-shelf, unimportant, idle, tired, depressed, improbable, iris-murdoch, seclusion, figurative-language, relationships, sadness, misanthropic, disbelief, unrequited-love, suicidal, spirited, antisocial, impossible-love, a-severed-head, nightmare

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