... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire… — 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
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“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 Image
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“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 Image
