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 MURDOCHWe 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?
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
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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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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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One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
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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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One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
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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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We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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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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Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
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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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I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
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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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There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
IRIS MURDOCH