We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
IRIS MURDOCHTo 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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
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What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
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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.
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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White magic is black magic. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
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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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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
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I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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We can only learn to love by loving.
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What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
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Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.
IRIS MURDOCH