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 MURDOCHI’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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
IRIS MURDOCH -
People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
IRIS MURDOCH -
This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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 -
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 -
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH -
An experience is richest not talked of.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 -
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 -
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
IRIS MURDOCH -
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
IRIS MURDOCH