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Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

Iris Murdoch

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
IRIS MURDOCH

Different Existence Growth Past Present
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

Death Different Pursue See Worth
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Greatness Human Race
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
IRIS MURDOCH

Art Doubt Happiness Impossible Life Live
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH

Deep Philosophy Sea Time
What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
IRIS MURDOCH

Extraordinary Myself Satisfaction
Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
IRIS MURDOCH

Love Need Togetherness Word
In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
IRIS MURDOCH

Philosophy Speed
An experience is richest not talked of.
IRIS MURDOCH

Experience Rich
One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
IRIS MURDOCH

Easy Lie Oneself People
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
IRIS MURDOCH

Goodness Honesty Human Learning Magic Place Wonderful
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
IRIS MURDOCH

Deep Freedom Philosophy Prison
Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
IRIS MURDOCH

Black Emotional Lie Strong World
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
IRIS MURDOCH

Beyond Greatness Present
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
IRIS MURDOCH

Death Live Moments Spirit Time
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH

Difficult Love Oneself Reality

Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

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Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

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