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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.

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
Spirit
Rare
Even
Mutual
Comparatively
Love
Sexual
Inconvenient
World
Creates
Exes
Intense
Erotic
Flesh
Refined
Sex
Reveals
Perhaps
Involves

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
Iris Murdoch
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
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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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... 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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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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It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Iris Murdoch
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Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
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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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Iris Murdoch
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Real worship involves waiting.
Iris Murdoch
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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
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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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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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch
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The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
Iris Murdoch
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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