I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
IRIS MURDOCHReading 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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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.
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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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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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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
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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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Of 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.
IRIS MURDOCH