704 Quotes About Iris-murdoch

How we tracked him, you most of all of course, and lost him and found him.

I had the illusion of conversing with a fellow being without a barrier, without a steel door, without a black hood over my head . . . I have never, I think, impressed upon you how almost impossible I find it to communicate with anybody.

One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying than the subject of death.

There are indeed many places where I could start. I might start with Rachel's tears, or Priscilla's. There is much shedding of tears in this story. In a complex explanation any order may seem arbitrary. Where after all does anything begin? That three of the four starting points I have mentioned were causally independent of each other suggests speculations, doubtless of the most irrational kind, upon the mystery of human fate.

If at that moment Clement had caught sight of the dog and had managed to capture him, the fates of a number of people in this story would have been entirely different. Such is the vast play of chance in human lives.

On this planet . . . many things are 'the rule' which are thoroughly evil and pernicious.

Oh what a mad business, no good can come of it, only chaos, and not just chaos but evil. How did we gradually get entangled in such a terribly dangerous shambles!

I mean he's honest, he sees the terrible things, he doesn't try to cover them up or imagine them away — the evil of the world, the senselessness of it all, the rottenness of us ordinary people, our fantasy life, our selfishness —

If Buddhists think evil is unreal they must be mad! Thinking evil is unreal is holding hands with evil under the table!