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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

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To Lose Somebody Is

Iris Murdoch

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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.

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We Live In A Fantasy World, A World Of Illusion. The Great Task In Life Is To Find Reality.

There Is A Spider Called Amaurobius, Which Lives In A Burrow And Has Its Young In The Late Summer, And Then It Dies When The Frosts Begin, And The Young Spiders Live Through The Cold By Eating Their Mother's Dead Body. One Can't Believe That's An Accident. I Don't Know That I Imagined God As Having Thought It All Out, But Somehow He Was Connected With The Pattern, He Was The Pattern.

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Real Worship Involves Waiting.

... 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.

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Yes, Of Course, There's Something Fishy About Describing People's Feelings. You Try Hard To Be Accurate, But As Soon As You Start To Define Such And Such A Feeling, Language Lets You Down. It's Really A Machine For Making Falsehoods. When We Really Speak The Truth, Words Are Insufficient. Almost Everything Except Things Like "pass The Gravy" Is A Lie Of A Sort. And That Being The Case, I Shall Shut Up. Oh, And... Pass The Gravy.

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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.

The Entry Of A Child Into Any Situation Changes The Whole Situation.

All Our Failures Are Ultimately Failures In Love.

Every Man Needs Two Women: A Quiet Home-maker, And A Thrilling Nymph.

The Chief Requirement Of The Good Life, Is To Live Without Any Image Of Oneself.

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.

Upon The Demon-ridden Pilgrimage Of Human Life, What Next I Wonder.

In A Happy Marriage There Is A Continuous Dense Magnetic Sense Of Communication.

Literature Could Be Said To Be A Sort Of Disciplined Technique For Arousing Certain Emotions.

Oh The Piercing Sadness Of Life In The Midst Of Its Ordinariness!

How Rarely Can Happiness Be Really Innocent And Not Triumphant, Not An Insult To The Deprived.

Art Is Brief. (not In A Temporal Sense.) [...] Words Are For Concealment. Art Is Concealment.

Most Real Relationships Are Involuntary.

Real Relationship

Those Who Hope, By Retiring From The World, To Earn A Holiday From Human Frailty, In Themselves And Others, Are Usually Disappointed.

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.

Our Actions Are Like Ships Which We May Watch Set Out To Sea, And Not Know When Or With What Cargo They Will Return To Port.

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... A Less Than Perfect Meddling In The Spiritual World Can Breed Monsters For Other People.

Socrates Wrote Nothing. Christ Wrote Nothing.

We Need A Moral Philosophy In Which The Concept Of Love, So Rarely Mentioned Now By Philosophers, Can Once Again Be Made Central.

Falling Out Of Love Is Chiefly A Matter Of Forgetting How Charming Someone Is.

Emotions Really Exist At The Bottom Of The Personality Or At The Top. In The Middle They Are Acted. This Is Why All The World Is A Stage.

Eating Reveals The Characteristic Grossness Of The Human Race And Also The In-built Failure Of Its Satisfactions. We Arrive Eager, We Stuff Ourselves And We Go Away Depressed And Disappointed And Probably Feeling A Bit Queasy Into The Bargain. It's An Image Of The Déçu In Human Existence. A Greedy Start And A Stupefied Finish. Waiters, Who Are Constantly Observing This Cycle, Must Be The Most Disillusioned Of Men.

Art Is Not Cozy And It Is Not Mocked. Art Tells The Only Truth That Ultimately Matters. It Is The Light By Which Human Things Can Be Mended. And After Art There Is, Let Me Assure You All, Nothing.

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 Of Individuals. Love Is The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real. Love, And So Art And Morals, Is The Discovery Of Reality.

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.

They Are Universal Places, Like Churches, Hallowed Meeting Places Of All Mankind.

A Long Marriage Is Very Unifying, Even If It's Not Ideal, And Those Old Structures Must Be Respected.

Coffee, Unless It Is Very Good And Made By Somebody Else, Is Pretty Intolerable At Any Time.

Learning Philosophy Is Learning A Particular Kind Of Intuitive Understanding.

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Evil Soon Makes Tools Out Of Those Who Don't Hate It.

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We Need A Moral Philosophy Which Can Speak Significantly Of Freud And Marx And Out Of Which Aesthetic And Political Views Can Be Generated. We Need A Moral Philosophy In Which The Concept Of Love, So Rarely Mentioned Now, Can Once Again Be Made Central.

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All Art Is The Struggle To Be, In A Particular Sort Of Way, Virtuous.

All Artists Dream Of A Silence Which They Must Enter, As Some Creatures Return To The Sea To Spawn.

A Letter Is A Barrier, A Reprieve, A Charm Against The World, An Almost Infallible Method Of Acting At A Distance.

The Most Interesting Things Are Always Happening Behind One.

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.

Every Book Is The Wreck Of A Perfect Idea.

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.

Art Is The Final Cunning Of The Human Soul Which Would Rather Do Anything Than Face The Gods.

Falling Out Of Love Is Very Enlightening. For A Short While You See The World With New Eyes.

Man's Creative Struggle, His Search For Wisdom And Truth, Is A Love Story.

We Shall Be Better Prepared For The Future If We See How Terrible, How Doomed The Present Is.

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What A Test That Is: More Than Devotion, Admiration, Passion. If You Long And Long For Someone’s Company You Love Them.

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Music Relates Sound And Time And So Pictures The Ultimate Edges Of Human Commmunications.

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The Talk Of Lovers Who Have Just Declared Their Love Is One Of Life's Most Sweet Delights. Each Vies With The Other In Humility, In Amazement At Being So Valued. The Past Is Searched For The First Signs And Each One Is In Haste To Declare All That He Is So That No Part Of His Being Escapes The Hallowing Touch.

My Heart Was Beating Like An Army On The March.

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I Feel Half Faded Away Like Some Figure In The Background Of An Old Picture.

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Love Is The Perception Of Individuals. Love Is The Extremely Difficult Realisation That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real.

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We Can Only Learn To Love By Loving.

A Bad Review Is Even Less Important Than Whether It Is Raining In Patagonia.

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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.

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Jealousy Is The Most Dreadfully Involuntary Of All Sins.

Every Artist Is An Unhappy Lover.

The Best Thing About Being God Would Be Making The Heads.

We Are All Prisoner, But The Name Of Our Cure Is Not Freedom

We Defend Ourselves By Descriptions And Tame The World By Generalizing.

Confession Ran In The Family.

All Art Deals With The Absurd And Aims At The Simple. Good Art Speaks Truth, Indeed Is Truth, Perhaps The Only Truth.

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I Daresay Anything Can Be Made Holy By Being Sincerely Worshipped.

Daytime Sleep Is A Cursed Slumber From Which One Wakes In Despair.

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!

People Who Boast Of Happy Marriages Are, I Submit, Usually Self-deceivers, If Not Actually Liars.

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There Is Nothing Like Early Promiscuous Sex For Dispelling Life's Bright Mysterious Expectations.

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Not To Have Been Born Is Undoubtedly Best, But Sound Sleep Is Second Best.

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.

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Love Is The Last And Secret Name Of All The Virtues.

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You Cannot Have Both Truth And What You Call Civilisation.

We Must Live By The Light Of Our Own Self-satisfaction, Through That Secret Vital Busy Inwardness Which Is Even More Remarkable Than Our Reason.

To Be A Complete Victim May Be Another Source Of Power.

Good Writing Is Full Of Surprises And Novelties, Moving In A Direction You Don't Expect.

Freedom Is Not Choosing; That Is Merely The Move That We Make When All Is Already Lost. Freedom Is Knowing And Understanding And Respecting Things Quite Other Than Ourselves.

The Sin Of Pride May Be A Small Or A Great Thing In Someone's Life, And Hurt Vanity A Passing Pinprick, Or A Self-destroying Or Ever Murderous Obsession.

I Live, I Live, With An Absolutely Continuous Sense Of Failure. I Am Always Defeated, Always. Every Book Is The Wreck Of A Perfect Idea. The Years Pass And One Has Only One Life. If One Has A Thing At All One Must Do It And Keep On And On And On Trying To Do It Better.

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No Love Is Entirely Without Worth, Even When The Frivolous Calls To The Frivolous And The Base To The Base.

The Bereaved Cannot Communicate With The Unbereaved.

Love Can't Always Do Work. Sometimes It Just Has To Look Into The Darkness.

Human Affairs Are Not Serious, But They Have To Be Taken Seriously.

Actors Are Cave Dwellers In A Rich Darkness Which They Love And Hate.

Only The Very Greatest Art Invigorates Without Consoling.

There Is Nothing Like The Bootless Solitude Of Those Who Are Caged Together.

People From A Planet Without Flowers Would Think We Must Be Mad With Joy The Whole Time To Have Such Things About Us.

Another Person's Illness Is Often Harder To Bear Than One's Own.

Perhaps Misguided Moral Passion Is Better Than Confused Indifference.

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Only Love Has Clear Vision. Hatred Has Cloudy Vision. When We Hate We Know Not What We Do.

Hegel Says That Truth Is A Great Word And The Thing Is Greater Still. With Dave We Never Seemed To Get Past The Word.

Art And Psychoanalysis Give Shape And Meaning To Life And That Is Why We Adore Them, But Life As It Is Lived Has No Shape And Meaning.

Every Artist Is An Unhappy Lover. And Unhappy Lovers Want To Tell Their Story.

Mathematics Is Good For The Soul, Getting Things Right Enlivens A Sense Of Truth, Efforts To Understand Automatically Purify Desires.

Between Saying And Doing, Many A Pair Of Shoes Is Worn Out.

Philosophy! Empty Thinking By Ignorant Conceited Men Who Think They Can Digest Without Eating!

Time Can Divorce Us From The Reality Of People, It Can Separate Us From People And Turn Them Into Ghosts. Or Rather It Is We Who Turn Them Into Ghosts Or Demons. Some Kinds Of Fruitless Preoccupations With The Past Can Create Such Simulacra, And They Can Exercise Power, Like Those Heroes At Troy Fighting For A Phantom Helen.

Being In Love Is An Exhausting Business.

Of Course Men Play Roles, But Women Play Roles Too, Blanker Ones. They Have, In The Play Of Life, Fewer Good Lines.

One Doesn't Have To Get Anywhere In A Marriage. It's Not A Public Conveyance.

What Makes You Imagine ... That Anything Of Importance Can Be Taught In A School?

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.

I Think The Novel Is Essentially A Comic Form (tragedy Is For The Theatre), Not Meaning By That Full Of Jokes, But That It Is About The Absurd Detail Of Human Life, The Way In Which One Cannot Fully Understand What Is Happening. Life Is Muddle And Jumble And Ends Inconclusively, And When This Is Presented With Great Comic Art The Sorrows Of Human Life Can Be Truthfully Conveyed; One Is Moved By The Spectacle, And Feels That Something Truthful Has Been Told In A Magic Way.

In Philosophy If You Aren't Moving At A Snail's Pace You Aren't Moving At All.

Art Is A Kind Of Artificial Memory And The Pain Which Attends All Serious Art Is A Sense Of That Factitiousness.

The Sending Of A Letter Constitutes A Magical Grasp Upon The Future.

Dogs Are Very Different From Cats In That They Can Be Images Of Human Virtue. They Are Like Us.

Almost Any Tale Of Our Doings Is Comic. We Are Bottomlessly Comic To Each Other. Even The Most Adored And Beloved Person Is Comic To His Lover. The Novel Is A Comic Form. Language Is A Comic Form, And Makes Jokes In Its Sleep. God, If He Existed, Would Laugh At His Creation. Yet It Is Also The Case That Life Is Horrible, Without Metaphysical Sense, Wrecked By Chance, Pain And The Close Prospect Of Death. Out Of This Is Born Irony, Our Dangerous And Necessary Tool.

The Very Madness Of The Scheme Protects It.

Youth Is A Marvelous Garment

I Have Used The Word "attention," Which I Borrow From Simone Weil, To Express The Idea Of A Just And Loving Gaze Directed Upon Individual Reality. I Believe This To Be The Characteristic And Proper Mark Of The Active Moral Agent.

There Is No Beyond, There Is Only Here, The Infinitely Small, Infinitely Great And Utterly Demanding Present.

The Theatre Is A Tragic Place, Full Of Endings And Partings And Heartbreak.

Probably No Adult Misery Can Be Compared With A Child's Despair.

Of Course Reading And Thinking Are Important But, My God, Food Is Important Too. How Fortunate We Are To Be Food-consuming Animals. Each Meal Should Be A Treat And One Ought To Bless Every Day Which Brings With It A Good Digestion And The Precious Gift Of Hunger.

I Am Not Famous For Anything In Particular. I Am Just Famous.

Happiness Is A Matter Of One's Most Ordinary Everyday Mode Of Consciousness Being Busy And Lively And Unconcerned With Self.

Of Course Reading And Thinking Are Important But, My God, Food Is Important Too.

It Is In The Capacity To Love, That Is To See, That The Liberation Of The Soul From Fantasy Consists. The Freedom Which Is A Proper Human Goal Is The Freedom From Fantasy, That Is The Realism Of Compassion. What I Have Called Fantasy, The Proliferation Of Blinding Self-centered Aims And Images, Is Itself A Powerful System Of Energy, And Most Of What Is Often Called 'will' Or 'willing' Belongs To This System. What Counteracts The System Is Attention To Reality Inspired By, Consisting Of, Love.

Perhaps When Distant People On Other Planets Pick Up Some Wavelength Of Ours All They Hear Is A Continuous Scream.

Anything That Consoles Is Fake.

Education Doesn’t Make You Happy. Nor Does Freedom. We Don’t Become Happy Just Because We’re Free – If We Are. Or Because We’ve Been Educated – If We Have. But Because Education May Be The Means By Which We Realize We Are Happy. It Opens Our Eyes, Our Ears, Tells Us Where Delights Are Lurking, Convinces Us That There Is Only One Freedom Of Any Importance Whatsoever, That Of The Mind, And Gives Us The Assurance – The Confidence – To Walk The Path Our Mind, Our Educated Mind, Offers.

Only Lies And Evil Come From Letting People Off.

Moralistic Is Not Moral. And As For Truth - Well, It's Like Brown - It's Not In The Spectrum. Truth Is So Generic.

But Fantasy Kills Imagination, Pornography Is Death To Art.

He Was A Sociologist; He Had Got Into An Intellectual Muddle Early On In Life And Never Managed To Get Out.

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.

We Re All Muddlers. The Thing Is To See Is When One's Got To Stop Muddling.

Trains Induce Such Terrible Anxiety. They Image The Possibility Of Total And Irrevocable Failure. They Are Also Dirty, Rackety, Packed With Strangers, An Object Lesson In The Foul Contingency Of Life: The Talkative Fellow-traveller, The Possibility Of Children.

The Most Potent And Sacred Command Which Can Be Laid Upon Any Artist Is The Command: Wait.

We Are All The Judges And The Judged, Victims Of The Casual Malice And Fantasy Of Others, And Ready Sources Of Fantasy And Malice In Our Turn. And If We Are Sometimes Accused Of Sins Of Which We Are Innocent, Are There Not Also Other Sins Of Which We Are Guilty And Of Which The World Knows Nothing?

Being Good Is Just A Matter Of Temperament In The End.

The Notion That One Can Liberate Another Soul From Captivity Is An Illusion Of The Very Young.

Language Is A Machine For Making Falsehoods.

It Is Difficult In Life To Be Good, And Difficult In Art To Portray Goodness. Perhaps We Don't Know Much About Goodness.

For Most Of Us The Space Between 'dreaming On Things To Come' And 'it Is Too Late, It Is All Over' Is Too Tiny To Enter.

People Have Obsessions And Fears And Passions Which They Don't Admit To. I Think Every Character Is Interesting And Has Extremes. It's The Novelist Privilege To See How Odd Everyone Is.

The Human Soul Is Not Framed For Continued Proximity, And The Result Of This Enforced Neighbourhood Is Often An Appalling Loneliness For Which The Rules Of The Game Forbid Assuagement.

True Love Gallops, It Flies, It Is The Swiftest Of All Modes Of Thought, Swifter Even Than Hate And Fear.

Words Are The Most Subtle Symbols Which We Possess And Our Human Fabric Depends On Them.

The Cry Of Equality Pulls Everyone Down.

A Death Is The Most Terrible Of Facts.

Bereavement Is A Darkness Impenetrable To The Imagination Of The Unbereaved

Any Writer Is Inevitably Going To Work With His Own Anxieties And Desires. If The Book Is Any Good It Has Got To Have In It The Fire Of A Personal Unconscious Mind.

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.

To Be Understood Is Not A Human Right. Even To Understand Oneself Is Not A Human Right.

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