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A death is the most terrible of facts.

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
Terrible
Death
Facts

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
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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... 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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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Iris Murdoch
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In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Iris Murdoch
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Iris Murdoch
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The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
Iris Murdoch
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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Iris Murdoch
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
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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So we live a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
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The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
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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We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
Iris Murdoch
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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
Iris Murdoch
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
Iris Murdoch
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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Iris Murdoch