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.
Iris MurdochStarting 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 MurdochWe are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
Iris MurdochAll artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
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