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There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch
Age: 79 †
Born: 1919
Born: July 15
Died: 1999
Died: February 8
Author
Biographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Writer
Dublin city
Jean Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch
Sleep
Race
Cannot
Human
Divisions
Humans
Gulf
Division
Fixed
Greatest

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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
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Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
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It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
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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.
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They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
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Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
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A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
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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.
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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.
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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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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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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
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