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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.

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
Fixed
Greatest
Sleep
Race
Cannot
Human
Divisions
Humans
Gulf
Division

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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
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Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
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It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
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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.
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
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I have used the word attention, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
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evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
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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.
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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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youth is a marvelous garment
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
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to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
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