“One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“What was to change many lives happened, and happened very fast in the next moments.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so—crucial.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it.… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things,… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“If at that moment Clement had caught sight of the dog and had managed to capture him, the fates of a number… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“He felt as if he were under an intolerable physical strain, as if his body were likely at any moment to fly… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
“I 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 Copy Share
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
“Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
