We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
IRIS MURDOCHJealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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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Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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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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So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
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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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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 just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
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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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Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
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I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
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The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
IRIS MURDOCH