We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
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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I don’t think I can marry, I’m not fit for it, I’m not real enough. That’s the trouble. I’m a puppet that’s realised what’s wrong with itself and it’s horrible. I’m propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I’m propped up crying in a corner.
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Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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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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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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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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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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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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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
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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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I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.
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One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
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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.
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Youth is a marvelous garment.
IRIS MURDOCH






