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 MurdochCoffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
Iris MurdochThere is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris MurdochTime 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.
Iris Murdoch