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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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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
Face
Chop
Back
Faces
Continual
Live
Moment
Plunge
Time
Lost
Void
Death
Final
Unremembered
Spirit
Finals
Broods
Meaning
Plunges
Moments
Came
Hovers
Ends

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
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Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
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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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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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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.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
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Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Iris Murdoch
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A death is the most terrible of facts.
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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We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
Iris Murdoch
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
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For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
Iris Murdoch
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Iris Murdoch
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How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
Iris Murdoch