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121 " We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them. "
― Iris Murdoch , The Black Prince
122 " I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art. "
123 " But what words exactly did he use? People who aren't writers never describe things exactly. "
124 " For the moment however behold me sitting with Priscilla and Francis. A domestic interior. It is about ten o'clock in the evening and the curtains are drawn. "
125 " I am not a neurotic!""You're trembling with nerves and sensibility—""Of course I am, I'm an artist! "
126 " There is so much grit in the bottom of the container, almost all our natural preoccupations are low ones, and in most cases the rag-bag of consciousness is only unified by the experience of great art or of intense love. Neither of these was relevant to my messy and absent-minded goings-on. "
127 " In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal. For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness. "
128 " But I have, I suppose, become through the power of love, awful, relentless. "
129 " You know when things get inside you and you can't stop going round and round the same piece of misery. "
130 " Little pictures out of hell. "
131 " One's capacity to forget absolutely is immense. "
132 " The only consolation I had was buying things. If I bought some pretty thing it cheered me up for a while. "
133 " Tuesday? My whole concept of the future had crumpled. "
134 " You understand nothing of—the horror—no wonder you can't write real books—you don't see—the horror— "
135 " You mustn't mind so much. It's all in your head.""Well, I live in my head. "
136 " Sometimes one has got to become monstrous in order to survive. "
137 " Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained. "
138 " The book is quite serious and quite funny. (Most novels are.) "
139 " One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying than the subject of death. "
140 " But I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. "