Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCHBut one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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 MURDOCH -
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
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 -
What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH -
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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 -
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
IRIS MURDOCH -
An experience is richest not talked of.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
IRIS MURDOCH -
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
IRIS MURDOCH -
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
IRIS MURDOCH