I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
IRIS MURDOCHHow 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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
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 -
I have nobody in the world. I’ll kill myself. That’s best. Everyone will say, It’s for the best that she killed herself, she’s better off dead. I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it.
IRIS MURDOCH -
We can only learn to love by loving.
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 -
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
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 -
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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 -
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
IRIS MURDOCH -
One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
IRIS MURDOCH -
What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
IRIS MURDOCH -
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
IRIS MURDOCH -
People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.
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 -
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