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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.

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
Form
Preservation
Thought
Forms
Human
Connected
Humans
Beings
Important
Capable
Writing
Beauty
Kind
Reading
Eloquence
Language
Terribly

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.
Iris Murdoch
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Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
Iris Murdoch
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Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Iris Murdoch
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The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
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we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
Iris Murdoch
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Iris Murdoch
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Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
Iris Murdoch
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All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Iris Murdoch
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Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
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to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
Iris Murdoch
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
Iris Murdoch
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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch
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The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
Iris Murdoch
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One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
Iris Murdoch
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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch
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People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
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... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.
Iris Murdoch
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We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
Iris Murdoch