01c. 1959 ADPeople from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADWhile the light remains,' said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, 'only do not forsake the joy of life. If you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few. And as leaves fall from withered wreaths which you may see spread upon the cups and floating there, so for us, who now as lovers hope for so much, perhaps tomorrow's day will close the doom.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADMarian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that. She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things. Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister. She felt, for the first time in her life, completely isolated and in danger. She became in an instant almost faint with terror.She said, as a cry for help, ‘I’m feeling terribly nervous’.‘I know you are,’ said Scottow.(…)Marian was appalled at the sudden quietness. But the insane panic had left her. She was frightened now in an ordinary way, sick in her stomach, shy, tongue-tied, horribly aware of the onset of a new world.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADAmo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADI felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADBereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereavedIris Murdoch / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADHe felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADI feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
09c. 1959 AD... male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
10c. 1959 ADIt 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 ↗
11c. 1959 ADThe past and present are after all so close, 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 ↗
12c. 1959 ADTrains 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.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADBut 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.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADOne forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
15c. 1959 ADWhat 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 ↗
16c. 1959 ADIt is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADYes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADAll the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADJealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
20c. 1959 ADI hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
22c. 1959 ADOur 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 / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADI am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less importantIris Murdoch / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADBut 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 ↗
