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?
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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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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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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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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Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
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I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
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In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
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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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Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
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I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
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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.
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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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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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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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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH