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 MURDOCHPeople 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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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 -
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.
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Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
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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 -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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Youth is a marvelous garment.
IRIS MURDOCH






