Iris Murdoch Quotes - Page 6

The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

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.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each 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.

There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

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.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

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.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?