People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.
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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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.
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
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I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
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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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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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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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I have nobody in the world. I’ll kill myself. That’s best. Everyone will say, It’s for the best that she killed herself, she’s better off dead. I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
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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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In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
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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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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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Youth is a marvelous garment.
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An experience is richest not talked of.
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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.
IRIS MURDOCH