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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch
Age: 79 †
Born: 1919
Born: July 15
Died: 1999
Died: February 8
Author
Biographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Writer
Dublin city
Jean Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch
Present
Shall
Literature
Future
Better
Doomed
Time
Prepared
Fate
Terrible

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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
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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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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
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Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
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It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.
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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
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We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
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He was a sociologist he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
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