People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
IRIS MURDOCHCoffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
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Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.
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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.
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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.
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Youth is a marvelous garment.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
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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.
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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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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?
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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.
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I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
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Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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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.
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We can only learn to love by loving.
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
IRIS MURDOCH