01c. 1959 ADLove is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADWriting is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADI know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADEducation doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADSo 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 / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADThere is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADDora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there?'Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADThe past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADEvery 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1959 ADTo anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADMercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADExistentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom, a freedom, if he wishes, to 'fly in the face of the facts'. What it pictures is indeed the fearful solitude of the individual marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts, and morality escaping from science only by a wild leap of the will. But our situation is not like this.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADI 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADThere 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 ↗
15c. 1959 ADBut very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADI am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADArtists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADHowever 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 ↗
20c. 1959 ADThe most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
21c. 1959 ADEven if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
22c. 1959 ADIt was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADthere was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heartIris Murdoch / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADThere are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
