I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
IRIS MURDOCHI felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
IRIS MURDOCH -
We 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?
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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?
IRIS MURDOCH -
Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
IRIS MURDOCH -
White magic is black magic. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
IRIS MURDOCH -
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
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 -
One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Let us not waste love, it is rare enough.
IRIS MURDOCH -
In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
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 -
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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 -
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 -
Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
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 -
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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 -
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
IRIS MURDOCH