I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
IRIS MURDOCHViolence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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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 MURDOCH -
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
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 -
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 MURDOCH -
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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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.
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What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
IRIS MURDOCH -
So 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.
IRIS MURDOCH