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87ce474
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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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realization
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Iris Murdoch |
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8f0dc3b
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I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
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solitude
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Iris Murdoch |
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562c5df
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I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a wor..
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grief
god
love
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Iris Murdoch |
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2a48a17
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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Iris Murdoch |
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ad313a4
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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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Iris Murdoch |
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a544773
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Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to consol..
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Iris Murdoch |
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d444af5
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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
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Iris Murdoch |
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cb91090
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we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
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Iris Murdoch |
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4f88b0b
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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.
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Iris Murdoch |
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22b8b48
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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.
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responsibility
karma
pay-it-forward
spiritual-guidance
reciprocity
consequences
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Iris Murdoch |
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fec9725
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emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
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Iris Murdoch |
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112690f
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The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
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Iris Murdoch |
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8e0e321
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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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Iris Murdoch |
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9c787a8
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What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.
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Iris Murdoch |
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038c8a0
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We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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Iris Murdoch |
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f6fbc82
|
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
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mortality
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Iris Murdoch |
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72b991d
|
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
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unimportant
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Iris Murdoch |
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c4c8a48
|
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
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Iris Murdoch |
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db2b085
|
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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Iris Murdoch |
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0d43131
|
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.
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Iris Murdoch |
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fade302
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Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
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Iris Murdoch |
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647e983
|
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?
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philosophy
schadenfreude
the-media
spite
malice
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Iris Murdoch |
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af13c9b
|
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
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stupidity
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Iris Murdoch |
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affc9f9
|
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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Iris Murdoch |
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75d2e91
|
youth is a marvelous garment
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Iris Murdoch |
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fee9aca
|
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.
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Iris Murdoch |
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2eed001
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The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our co..
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Iris Murdoch |
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c297153
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I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the..
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Iris Murdoch |
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c79325c
|
Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.
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blindness
radar
love-hurts
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Iris Murdoch |
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cdeeaff
|
What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)
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Iris Murdoch |
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0cd26b5
|
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
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Iris Murdoch |
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ec0a899
|
Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection.
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Iris Murdoch |
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0450b9f
|
The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.
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theatre
actors
audiences
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Iris Murdoch |
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3027e33
|
I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')
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romeo-and-juliet
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Iris Murdoch |
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618fae3
|
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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grief
stillness
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Iris Murdoch |
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229c300
|
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
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Iris Murdoch |
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15a05cb
|
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.
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relationships
life
love
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Iris Murdoch |
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53c5665
|
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like , it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.' 'You do, then, fall in love.' 'Only with fictions, I..
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theatre
jealousy
love
remorse
regret
hamlet
theater
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Iris Murdoch |
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7634da7
|
It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is a..
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Iris Murdoch |
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96f3a55
|
I've felt as if I didn't exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can't imagine how much alone I've been all my life.
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apart
dissociated
the-sea-the-sea
iris-murdoch
outcast
invisible
lonely
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Iris Murdoch |
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550297b
|
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
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Iris Murdoch |
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a192534
|
Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit... Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful ..
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wild-nothing-paradise
lsd
|
Iris Murdoch |
|
b8d18c8
|
There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.
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women
shoes
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Iris Murdoch |
|
e9835b8
|
All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.
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language
|
Iris Murdoch |