People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.
IRIS MURDOCHWe 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?
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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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.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
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How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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 -
Youth is a marvelous garment.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCH -
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
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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 -
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






