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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

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
Life
Ordinariness
Piercing
Unhappiness
Midst
Sadness

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
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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.
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch
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for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
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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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The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
Iris Murdoch
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youth is a marvelous garment
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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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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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
Iris Murdoch
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All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
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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Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Iris Murdoch
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch