Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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 -
That doesn’t sound like you, you ride every wave. There is one that will drown me
IRIS MURDOCH -
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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 -
People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.
IRIS MURDOCH -
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.
IRIS MURDOCH -
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
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






