Iris Murdoch Quotes

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Quotes About Iris Murdoch

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Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at. ~ Iris Murdoch
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It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way. ~ Iris Murdoch
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She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again. ~ Iris Murdoch
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As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer's mind. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter. ~ Iris Murdoch
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She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature. ~ Iris Murdoch
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The chief requirement of the good life', said Michael, 'is that one should have some conception of one's capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has ... One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles. ~ Iris Murdoch
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One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Religion is having an intense attitude and no time off... religion is about those awful deep things. ~ Iris Murdoch
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I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Girls don't want men to be quiet and gentle, I'm told. If you're not panting with impatient lust they think you're not interested. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. ~ Iris Murdoch
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I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there. ~ Iris Murdoch
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The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. ~ Iris Murdoch
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People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is. ~ Iris Murdoch
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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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He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Every artist is an unhappy lover. ~ Iris Murdoch
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And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world. ~ 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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You see, nobody cares about me except you. You don't know what that's like. You've always had people who cared. You've always had people. I've never had anybody. No wonder I feel frustrated. ~ Iris Murdoch
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For most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. ~ Iris Murdoch
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His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him. ~ Iris Murdoch
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There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph. ~ Iris Murdoch
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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. ~ Iris Murdoch
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He looked so sad. I never saw him look sad before, he was always so superior, everywhere the king. You once called him a god from elsewhere who had lost his way. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you. ~ Iris Murdoch
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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart ... ~ Iris Murdoch
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I saw . . . what I've really know all along, that you are my truth. For me you are the way the truth and the life. Only here can I be totally myself. ~ Iris Murdoch
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So, in a curious lurid calm which could not last and yet, it seemed, could not end, the days went by. ~ Iris Murdoch
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How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. ~ Iris Murdoch
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The unspoken words trembled in the air. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this. ~ Iris Murdoch
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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. ~ Iris Murdoch
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It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day. ~ Iris Murdoch
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power. ~ Iris Murdoch
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T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. ~ Iris Murdoch
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My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that. ~ Ruth Rendell
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We're just living on our emotions and eating each other. ~ Iris Murdoch
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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. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Why do I always have to be helping people . . . and getting no help myself? ~ Iris Murdoch
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I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody . . . And it precludes any real loyalty to anybody. ~ Iris Murdoch
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He was extremely angry with Bellamy who had, when Clement needed him, refused to be with him. ~ Iris Murdoch
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youth is a marvelous garment ~ Iris Murdoch
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Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that. ~ Iris Murdoch
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White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Any society contains propaganda, but it is important to distinguish this from art and to preserve the purity and independence of the practice of art. A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Well, you won't abandon me, will you."

"Don't be silly, Ludens, you are buckled to my heart. ~ 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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Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. ~ Iris Murdoch
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It's much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it. ~ Iris Murdoch
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There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so - crucial. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong? ~ Iris Murdoch
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And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one's only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one's partners head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow! ~ Iris Murdoch
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But one must do something about the past. It doesn't just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Youth is a marvelous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity, when, as in her own case, one ceases to be une jeune fille un peu folle, and becomes merely a woman, worst of all, a wife. The very young have their troubles, but they have at least a part to play, the part of being very young. ~ Iris Murdoch
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And this great love makes you both ruthless. ~ 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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Some people are just 'diminishers' and 'spoilers' for others. I suppose almost everybody diminishes someone. A saint would be nobody's spoiler. ~ Iris Murdoch
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The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits. ~ Iris Murdoch
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I said, "Your brother is in bed with my wife." I added, "I just took them up some wine in bed. ~ Iris Murdoch
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The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. ~ Iris Murdoch
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They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind. ~ Iris Murdoch
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You can't magic yourself out of the situation, you've got to live it as decently and as grimly as you can. ~ Iris Murdoch
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I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move. ~ Iris Murdoch
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What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn? ~ Iris Murdoch
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Now, when she felt so deeply connected to him, they were finally estranged. ~ Iris Murdoch
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I suddenly feel . . . as if he might never come. There are 'nevers' in people's lives. People go away, people die, it does happen - ~ Iris Murdoch
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You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels. ~ William Golding
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Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of. ~ Iris Murdoch
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What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice. ~ Iris Murdoch
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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown. ~ Iris Murdoch
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How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain. ~ Iris Murdoch
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But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream. ~ Iris Murdoch
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She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage. ~ Iris Murdoch
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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. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Only stories and magic really endure. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes. ~ Iris Murdoch
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But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. ~ Iris Murdoch
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How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters. ~ Iris Murdoch
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She could not bear the tenderness which a dog would evoke, she did not want the pain of another love. She knew how very much, how desperately, she would love her dog; and dogs are vulnerable and short-lived and die. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic. ~ Iris Murdoch
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Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool. ~ Iris Murdoch
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I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow - I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on . . . I'm so Christ-awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end. ~ Iris Murdoch
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You're doing your thing, why can't I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it. ~ Iris Murdoch
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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 éternel retour, 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 love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there's waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start. ~ Iris Murdoch
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There is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are. ~ Iris Murdoch
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