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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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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
Course
Women
Play
Good
Fewer
Men
Ones
Life
Roles
Lines
Courses

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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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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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 priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
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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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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
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The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
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It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.
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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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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
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People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
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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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I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
Iris Murdoch
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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Iris Murdoch
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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
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... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
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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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