Iris Murdoch: The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little ev...

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

Iris Murdoch

triumph ifs

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

Iris Murdoch

caged solitude together

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

Iris Murdoch

tragic parting theatre

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

Iris Murdoch

selfish marriage giving

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

Iris Murdoch

concealment art-is art

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

Iris Murdoch

self long country

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

Iris Murdoch

breathe awful wish

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Iris Murdoch

hegel truth-is past

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

Iris Murdoch

hate-and-fear hate

They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.

Iris Murdoch

meetings mankind church

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Iris Murdoch

frailty holiday world

Being in love is an exhausting business.

Iris Murdoch

exhausting being-in-love love-is

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.

Iris Murdoch

secret mind thinking

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

Iris Murdoch

illusion captivity soul

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

Iris Murdoch

precarious void states

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

Iris Murdoch

sea may song

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

Iris Murdoch

division race sleep

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.

Iris Murdoch

hate soul self

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

Iris Murdoch

secret life-is happy-life

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

Iris Murdoch

moral people way

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.