Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
Iris MurdochTrains 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.
Iris MurdochWe must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
Iris Murdoch... 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.
Iris Murdoch