Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.
IRIS MURDOCHPeople from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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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.
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
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Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
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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 -
Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
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One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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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.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
IRIS MURDOCH