Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.
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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
-
-
We 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 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 -
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 -
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH -
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 -
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 -
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 MURDOCH -
One 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 -
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
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 -
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 -
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH