Iris Murdoch - Under the Net (1954)

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Until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.

Iris Murdoch
He... raised his hand when he saw me with the dignified gesture of a patriarch greeting the appearance of an expected sign.

Iris Murdoch
Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.

Iris Murdoch
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

Iris Murdoch
When caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?

Iris Murdoch
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
All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

Iris Murdoch
I 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
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

Iris Murdoch
Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

Iris Murdoch
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

Iris Murdoch
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

Iris Murdoch
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

Iris Murdoch
So 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