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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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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
World
Letter
Barriers
Charm
Letters
Method
Distance
Reprieve
Almost
Barrier
Acting
Infallible

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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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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
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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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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
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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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The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
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evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
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A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
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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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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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We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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