Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
~ Iris Murdoch

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Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
~ Iris Murdoch

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I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
~ Iris Murdoch

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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
~ Iris Murdoch

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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
~ Iris Murdoch

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