I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
IRIS MURDOCHTime, like the sea, unties all knots.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Youth is a marvelous garment.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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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.
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The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
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I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
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Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
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Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
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Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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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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I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?
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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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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.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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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.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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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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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.
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Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
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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?
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
IRIS MURDOCH