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 MURDOCHOf course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
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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.
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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Anything that consoles is fake.
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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 -
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Youth is a marvelous garment.
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For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
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An experience is richest not talked of.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH