“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“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, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“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, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“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, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--'
'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“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, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look--”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“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, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
“let us not waste love, it is rare enough”
― Iris Murdoch, quote from The Sea, the Sea
Iris Murdoch
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
Born date July 15, 1919
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“My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over in my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read.”
― Ken Liu, quote from The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
“Apathy is a tide pool that drowns its victims.”
― K.M. Weiland, quote from Dreamlander
“The much lauded objective evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspiration or Grenzbegriff [limit or ideal notion] marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life … [But] when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.”
― quote from The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“It's enough to make you believe. Maybe not in symbols; maybe not in gods. But certainly in people.”
― Emery Lord, quote from The Names They Gave Us
“Does my request make sense in terms of my child’s age and ability? (Am I expecting an eight-year-old to have perfect table manners?)”
― Adele Faber, quote from How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk
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