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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.

Iris Murdoch

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
IRIS MURDOCH

Character. Priviledge Fear Myself Passion People Thinking
Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
IRIS MURDOCH

Love Need Togetherness Word
We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
IRIS MURDOCH

Moral Need Philosophy Politics
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

Fantasy Guilty Judgement Ourselves Sin World
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
IRIS MURDOCH

Amazing Commitment Marriage Oneself Writing
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCH

Food Goodness Tolerance
This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
IRIS MURDOCH

Heart Quiet See
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
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
IRIS MURDOCH

Action Philosophy Talk
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
IRIS MURDOCH

Born Desire Escape Oneself Violence
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

Better Happiness Life Oneself Quick Secret
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
IRIS MURDOCH

Comfortable Relationship
Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
IRIS MURDOCH

Enough Love Rare Wasted
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
IRIS MURDOCH

Live Ourselves Philosophy
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
IRIS MURDOCH

Important Rain
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
IRIS MURDOCH

Art Happiness Love Poet Story
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
I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
IRIS MURDOCH

Different End Feeling Myself
People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.
IRIS MURDOCH

Disappoint Myself People
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

Alive Happiness Human Time
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
IRIS MURDOCH

Darkness Imagination
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
IRIS MURDOCH

Beyond Greatness Present
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
IRIS MURDOCH

Escape Life Love Talk Value
Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.
IRIS MURDOCH

Fear Fundamental Human Marriage Nature
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH

Beautiful Break Up Fall Forget Love
Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
IRIS MURDOCH

Change Eyes Forever Hands World
An experience is richest not talked of.
IRIS MURDOCH

Experience Rich

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.

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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.

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