The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
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Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
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How 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.
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Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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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 -
Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
IRIS MURDOCH -
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
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What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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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.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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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.
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
IRIS MURDOCH