But 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.
IRIS MURDOCHEvery book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH -
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
IRIS MURDOCH -
Youth is a marvelous garment.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
IRIS MURDOCH -
What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Anything that consoles is fake.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
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 -
One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
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 -
Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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






