Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCHWe are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
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In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
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We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
IRIS MURDOCH -
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
IRIS MURDOCH -
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
IRIS MURDOCH -
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
IRIS MURDOCH -
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
IRIS MURDOCH -
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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 -
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
IRIS MURDOCH -
This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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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.
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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 -
I have nobody in the world. I’ll kill myself. That’s best. Everyone will say, It’s for the best that she killed herself, she’s better off dead. I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it.
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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
IRIS MURDOCH -
People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.
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I don’t think I can marry, I’m not fit for it, I’m not real enough. That’s the trouble. I’m a puppet that’s realised what’s wrong with itself and it’s horrible. I’m propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I’m propped up crying in a corner.
IRIS MURDOCH -
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
IRIS MURDOCH