What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneโs company you love them.
Iris MurdochThose who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Iris MurdochOf 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.
Iris MurdochThen I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
Iris Murdoch