Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
IRIS MURDOCHThose who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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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 -
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Reading 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 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.
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.
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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.
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Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
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To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Starting 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 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 -
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Youth is a marvelous garment.
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 felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.
IRIS MURDOCH -
An experience is richest not talked of.
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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 -
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 -
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
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