There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
IRIS MURDOCHStarting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
IRIS MURDOCH -
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 -
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
That doesn’t sound like you, you ride every wave. There is one that will drown me
IRIS MURDOCH -
I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.
IRIS MURDOCH