Iris Murdoch Quotes

The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.

It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.

It's been 25 years now, and truthfully, time sometimes blurs the memory.

The strange thing about living somewhere for a couple of years and then moving on and not returning is that those locations become ghosts of themselves in your mind.

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

But it's far too late for us; ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram.

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.

And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

When a marriage fails, the story of the relationship changes. The best parts, the parts that made you think getting married was a good idea, fade from memory.

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind...

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

A dead love never dies.

When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colours which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed.

They say time will make all this go away. But it's time that has taken my tomorrows and turned them into yesterdays.

... we chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

Maybe the past is supposed to fade-and that's actually a kindness of human memory.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind, Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune, Following the donkey's bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses, On the high door of a skull and in some corner, Of an irrefrangible eye, Some old man memory jumps to a child - Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.

You were everything, everything that I wanted. We were meant to be, supposed to be, but we lost it. And all of the memories, so close to me, just fade away. All this time you were pretending. So much for my happy ending.

The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.