Iris Murdoch

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.

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.

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

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!

I rather liked him.I asked him to come and see us.'
‘Oh Christ !’
‘But, Bradley, you mustn’t reject people,you musn't just write them of. You must be curious about them. Curiosity is kind of charity.’
‘I don’t think curiosity is a kind of charity. I think it’s a kind of malice.’
‘That’s what makes a writer, knowing the details.’
‘It may make your kind of writer. It doesn’t make mine.’
‘Here we go again,’ said Arnold.
‘Why pile up a jumble of “details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’
‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold. ‘I don’t draw direct from life.’
‘Your wife thinks you do.’
‘Oh that. Oh God.’
‘Inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one’s spotted isn’t art. ‘
‘Of course it isn’t -‘
‘Vague romantic myth isn’t art either. Art is imagination. Imagination changes, fuses. Without imagination you have stupid details on one side and empty dreams on the othet.’
‘Bradley, I know you -‘
‘Art isn’t chat plus fantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silnce.’
‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art! It’s people without creative gifts who say that more mean worse!’
‘One should only complete something when one feels one’s bloody privileged to have it all. Those who only do what’s easy will never be rewarded by -‘
‘Nonsense. I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they’re perfect or not. Anything else is hypocrisy. I have no muse. That’s what being a professional writer is.’
‘Then thank God I’m not one.’…

All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.

The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith.

"You've obviously never been in love."

"I have actually. And <i>awfully</i>. And — always — without hope — I've never had my love reciprocated ever."

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.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

It 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.

I've been so unhappy for years, so unhappy . . . I don't understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.

How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.