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All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

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
Dream
Spawn
Must
Enter
Artists
Sea
Creatures
Return
Silence
Artist

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Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
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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.
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
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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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Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
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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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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
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Real worship involves waiting.
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Freedom is not choosing that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
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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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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
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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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Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
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A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
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