How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
IRIS MURDOCHHow huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
IRIS MURDOCHAnything that consoles is fake.
IRIS MURDOCHLove doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
IRIS MURDOCHWriting is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
IRIS MURDOCHJealousy 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 MURDOCHWe live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?
IRIS MURDOCHHow 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.
IRIS MURDOCHBetween saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
IRIS MURDOCHReading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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.
IRIS MURDOCHHer eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
IRIS MURDOCHGuilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
IRIS MURDOCHWe 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?
IRIS MURDOCHOnly take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
IRIS MURDOCHSo 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 MURDOCHOne 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