Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
IRIS MURDOCHViolence is born of the desire to escape oneself.
IRIS MURDOCHLove is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCHI feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
IRIS MURDOCHOne should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
IRIS MURDOCHWhat an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
IRIS MURDOCHSo 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 MURDOCHFor most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
IRIS MURDOCHBut 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 MURDOCHHow huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
IRIS MURDOCHYouth is a marvelous garment.
IRIS MURDOCHAs 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 MURDOCHOur 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 MURDOCHOne 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 MURDOCHOf course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
IRIS MURDOCHLove doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
IRIS MURDOCHI felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
IRIS MURDOCH