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

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
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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.
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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
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Real worship involves waiting.
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
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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.
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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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The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
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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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We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
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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.
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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
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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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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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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.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Iris Murdoch