Living on Paper Quotes

“Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images’.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“Darling the mice have been eating your letters (not indeed that that is my excuse for not writing for so long, my excuse for that is everything or nothing, whichever way you like to look at it). I am very angry about this, chiefly because your letters are rather precious documents, but also because I am not on very good terms with the mice, and the fact that I have been careless enough to leave valuables around where they could get at them can be chalked up as a point to them. One day I shall declare serious war on the mice in a combined trap-poison operation. At present I am just sentimental with a fringe of annoyance. I meet them every now and then, on the stairs, or underneath the gas stove, and they have such nice long tails.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“By the time she wrote The Sovereignty of Good in 1970 her criticism had become stringent: ‘we are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy’.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“By 1993 Murdoch was becoming reluctant to engage in public activities and dreaded giving interviews. These late letters increasingly evidence the language difficulties and amnesia that, in retrospect, suggest the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, although the condition remained undiagnosed until 1997.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“There is also the evident dualism between those who know (the jargon, made of discourse etc.) and those who do not, who are not really using language but being used by it.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“I’ve just been visiting (second visit) a chap called Krishnamurti,fn105 who used to be very famous (and beautiful – he’s still beautiful age ninety-one) some time ago. He is an Indian sage, discovered as a child by the theosophists (as the ‘destined one’ etc.) and transported to Europe. In India he is a god. He teaches a kind of anti-religious quasi-mystical good way of life. I was asked to have a (videotaped for the faithful) discussion with him, which though producing little clarity interested me a lot. How very very serious human beings are in their deep assumptions about morals, mind etc. etc. (Obvious idea, but I find I lose it from time to time!) I think he is a remarkable being, though I don’t like all his talk. […]”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“At Cambridge I took minor (John major) part in a Virginia Woolf centenary conference. As I hadn’t read any VW since school (possibly college) days, I felt bound to reread at least all the novels. It’s super to wake up now in the morning and realise I don’t have to read a Virginia Woolf novel today. I am prepared to admire some of the stuff but do not like either it or her”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“for the Labour Party – splendid news. That increasingly leftward bound organisation is in process of splitting, and Shirley Williams,fn31 Roy Jenkinsfn32 etc. will found a new Social Democratic Partyfn33 (this oddly repeats events in Oxford circa 1940 when I was chairman of the leftward bound Labour Club and Roy Jenkins led a group to found a new Social Democratic Club. How right he was!). It’s a pity about the Labour Party but given the whole scene the split is best. It is now official Labour policy to leave the Common Market and NATO! And unofficially are likely to abolish the House of Lords instantly and have no second chamber, abolish private schooling etc. And of course (this is perhaps the main point) to have the leadership under the control of the executive committee (and Labour activists in the constituencies) substituting party ‘democracy’ for parliamentary democracy. I blame Denis Healey and others very much for not reacting firmly earlier against the left. A crucial move was when the parliamentary party elected Michael Foot, that wet crypto-left snake, as leader instead of Denis. Now Denis and co. are left behind, complaining bitterly, to fight the crazy left. Shirley still hasn’t resigned from the party so it’s all a bit odd! ‘On your bike, Shirl,’ the lefty trade unionists shout at her!”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“I was asked rather suddenly to join a delegation going to China, early October (alas John couldn’t come because of Oxford term). (Another member was David Attenborough, the very nice animal TV man.)”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“To The Times. Steeple Aston 19 April 1974 Sir, I hear on my radio Mr Reg Prentice, of the party which I support, saying to a gathering on education the following: ‘The eleven plus must go, so must selection at twelve plus, at sixteen plus, and any other age.’ What can this mean? How are universities to continue? Are we to have engineers without selection of those who understand mathematics, linguists without selection of those who understand grammar? To many teachers such declarations of policy must seem obscure and astonishing, and to imply the adoption of some quite new philosophy of education which has not, so far as I know, been in this context discussed. It is certainly odd that the Labour Party should wish to promote a process of natural unplanned sorting which will favour the children of rich and educated people, leaving other children at a disadvantage. I thought socialism was concerned with the removal of unfair disadvantages. Surely what we need is a careful reconsideration of how to select, not the radical and dangerous abandonment of the principle of selection. Yours faithfully, Iris Murdoch”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“To Rachel Fenner. Steeple Aston 15 February 1968 Rachel, thanks for your letter. I am sorry about these moods but what can one do? I know of such things too. We are born to sorrow. And you are not the only one in whom things ‘do not fit’. I suspect it is a general human condition. (Before writing this letter I was reading Shakespeare’s sonnets: there’s a chap who suffered.) You know that I love you, and in no trivial sense. Don’t feel that I could be offended – I respect and value all that you feel, and you must just try to forgive my involuntary lack of ‘response’ in so far as it annoys you at times. We are hopelessly muddled and imperfect animals – I mean the lot of us – even Shakespeare. Thank God for art. Much love I”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“Labour in power?”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“Having a great phase of reading Dickens – gosh he is good – though so careless. But so beautifully funny – as well as other things. Oh to achieve the purely funny! Where does it reside?”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“I am enjoying seeing and learning things here, though I don’t ‘like’ the place in a way. It makes me feel such a decadent sybaritic old European. I leave Yale on Friday, go to Boston, Washington and back to New York – and sail on Nov 4.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“One should never tell anything to somebody who won’t think about it right. Or is this too timid a doctrine?”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“I understand what you say about not being ‘distracted’, but wrapping the thing round with layers of patience. It can take a long time. But that resolution is much – and there are moments of great strength in despair, at least I have found it so, if one does not cheat about the completeness of loss. I know what you mean too about consolation. I don’t offer anything intended as a substitute or based on any calculation of compassion, but simply and because I must, love and more love.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“In October 2014 files released from the National Archives revealed that MI5 ‘opened personal files on the popular historian A. J. P. Taylor, the writer Iris Murdoch and the moral philosopher Mary Warnock after they and [Christopher] Hill signed a letter supporting a march against the nuclear bomb in 1959’.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“Murdoch was now in great academic and public demand. Despite having been diagnosed as partially deaf with Ménière’s disease, an incurable affliction of the inner ear, she gave many lectures and interviews, as well as visiting Yale University in October 1959.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“So there are long conversations in cafés about Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau, and all the boys that we were just beginning to get excited about in London when the first French literature filtered across after the Liberation. My God, Leo, there is some very interesting stuff being written in France at present on the philosophical and literary front. I begin to get some glimmering too about ‘existentialism’ the latest philosophy of France – Sartre, out of Husserl, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Last week I had a very great experience. Jean-Paul Sartre came to Brussels to give a lecture on existentialism, and I met him after the lecture, and on the following day during an interminable café séance. He is small, squints appallingly, is very simple and charming in manner and extremely attractive. What versatility! Philosophy, novels, plays, cinema, journalism! No wonder the stuffy professional philosophers are suspicious. I don’t make much yet of his phenomenology, but his theories on morals, which derive from Kierkegaard, seem to me first rate and just what English philosophy needs to have injected into its veins, to expel the loathsome humours of Ross and Prichard.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“I am reading another Henry James called The Ambassadors – the man is uncanny the way he unravels a psychological situation. He writes in about five dimensions – and in that gorgeous convoluted style which, if you give it your closest attention, is nevertheless not obscure. He is the only novelist I know who really says everything – and gets away with it. To write like that is self-evidently one of the greatest activities of the human mind. I hope the New World Order will agree!”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“Beveridgefn20 is a good thing though – that’s all right, so long as people don’t start relaxing with a sigh of relief. (I’ve just been reading Bev. – a fine piece of work – thorough and equitable – and it will be a good fight, trying to get it put into operation – doomed to failure I surmise, but instructive.)”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“Like Proust I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time into the coolness and poise of a work of art. (Agreeing with Huxley for once, I think it is not what one has experienced, but what one does with what one has experienced that matters. The only possible doctrine of course for one who has experienced remarkably little of the big world!)”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“Ignorance I know – ‘innocence’ I imagine is just a word.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“She committed her energies to the Labour Party in 1944 but expressed disappointment with its leaders, complaining to David Hicks in May of ‘the usual lack of unity and intelligent leadership on the left’. To her surprise and delight, however, the Labour Party swept to victory in July 1945.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995

“I’ve almost finished The Republic. I find Plato at times a vile casuist, and almost always a reactionary. But he does write exquisite Greek.”
― Iris Murdoch, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995