Quotes & Sayings About Iris

I never just went to look for clothes and style; I always find that wherever I go. — Iris Apfel

These are things I love, things I've worn. I get more compliments on accessories than anything else. I think they're kind of like herbs and spices. They give zest and zing to an outfit. — Iris Apfel

Nobody is original anymore. Nobody has any original style. — Iris Apfel

Maybe she was a wallflower. There was no shame in that. Especially not if one enjoyed being a wallflower. — Julia Quinn

It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies. — Iris Chang

I used to collect frames. I've been collecting accessories since I was 11-years-old, creeping around flea markets and sales and everything. Whenever I saw unusual eyeglass frames, I bought them. — Iris Apfel

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word. — Iris Murdoch

Every day should be an adventure, not a treadmill — Iris Johansen

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal. — Iris Murdoch

I think I still keep my sense of wonder, which I call childlike, not childish, childlike. I still have a vivid imagination, and I like to try a lot of new things. — Iris Apfel

The cry of equality pulls everyone down. — Iris Murdoch

I hate being asked how I met my husband and very personal questions like that. I don't like that. People are too nosey. Intelligent questions I like, but sometimes people ask such silly, dopey ones. — Iris Apfel

The White House is the people's house. When you do historical restoration, that must be what it is. — Iris Apfel

You don't respect me," said Dora, her voice trembling.
"Of course I don't respect you," said Paul. "Have I any reason to? I'm in love with you, unfortunately, that's all."
"Well, it's unfortunate for me too," said Dora, starting to cry. — Iris Murdoch

Reading these books. Oh, the endless labor of the intellectual - pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris. — Irvin D. Yalom

Even after having months to adjust, Iris was "displeased" about my employment, which was like saying PETA was displeased by the popularity of TripleMeat Whataburgers. — Molly Harper

Creativity is down the tube. And people give a lot of lip service to individuality. I know they all appreciate it, but they all say they would like to do it, but they don't want to work at it, and it doesn't come out of the sky. — Iris Apfel

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits. — Iris Murdoch

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after. — Iris Murdoch

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. — Iris Murdoch

When I'm up to something I find it very hard to realize that I probably look no different from the way I look on other occasions. — Iris Murdoch

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice. — Iris Chang

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous. — Iris Murdoch

To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestows — Gregory Maguire

And what a lovely body the young girl possessed! She was obviously proud of it herself & never seemed ashamed to display it. Iris Leong then decided that if she had a body like Phyllis', she, too, would be proud to display it in all its glory.
All the cards now appeared to be stacked in the girl's favour. She enjoyed orgasms all day long & yet never had to fear about losing her virginity. She thus had her cake & also ate it. She should be a model to all young girls, Iris decided.[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

He felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls. — Iris Murdoch

You can change the look of an outfit so easily by changing the kind of jewellery you wear. If you have a basic outfit on - a black sweater and skirt or a simple black dress - you can go from the office to a cocktail party at night just by changing your jewellery. It helps if you change your shoes as well. — Iris Apfel

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect. — Iris Murdoch

One of the things we haven't taught our people as a nation, that this is their country. We haven't told them that this Bahamas belongs to them. Whether it succeeds or fails it is entirely up to them. WE haven't told our people that they are valuable. I sometimes pass little boys playing in the road and I would stop my car and say to them: 'Excuse me baby, do you realize how valuable you are? Do not play in the road, if anything happen to you that is going to hurt us. Because you might be our Prime Minister one day. Iris Adderley, consultant in the Disability Affairs Devision of The Department of Social Services. — Drexel Deal

night. She doesn't have a — Iris Johansen

What if love is made and nothing else?
asked Narcissus, leaning over the green iris of water.

Nothing else,
cried Echo from the green cochlea of the woods.

And they were both right.
And they were both lonely. — Kapka Kassabova

I'm not going to be a rebel and offend anybody, but I'm not going to live in somebody else's image. — Iris Apfel

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. — Iris Murdoch

I don't mind solitude. I love talking to other people, but I do need my space. — Iris Chang

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. — Iris Murdoch

She was his rock. It was blasphemy to imagine a life without Iris in it. — A.A. Gupte

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. — Iris Murdoch

Amanda raised her glass in a toast. "Here's a wet one to Saint Iris of the Hummocks!" Then she winced and scowled at Riker, who had kicked her under the table. Polly raised her glass and quoted from Hamlet: "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. — Lilian Jackson Braun

It's hard to know what's right when everyone thinks you're wrong. — Iris Johansen

Iris neatened up the rows of mugs. A newish collection caught her eye. "Is this supposed to be Snow White and the seven dwarfs?" "I think so. Though Snow White looks like she melted a little bit." "So did the little guys. Look, here's Sleazy. And Dumpy." She began to line them up. "And Dumpier." Iris pulled — Nancy Warren

We got CEOs making 200 times the worker's pay, but they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage. — Iris Dement

The whole summer was inside of us. — Leah Raeder

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
— Iris Murdoch

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel. — Junot Diaz

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all. — Iris Murdoch

There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good. — Iris Murdoch

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. — Iris Murdoch

You can be born with the talent to be an opera star, but you've got to work and practice it. — Iris Apfel

I'm making a lot of noise as I walk. — Iris Apfel

The world is not black and white; there are lots of shades of grey. There are good things and bad things in every era, and I think it's kind of very blindfolded to say one era was wonderful, as it was wonderful, but there were a lot of bad things as well. — Iris Apfel

I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject ... — Iris Origo

She tells so many different stories and they are all false. — Iris Murdoch

Lies are like a treadmill with no off switch. You have to keep walking or you'll fall off. — Iris St. Clair

He stepped toward her, and her heart just ached from it. His face was so handsome, and so dear, and so perfectly wonderfully familiar. She knew the slope of his cheeks, and the exact shade of his eys, brownish near the iris, melting into green at the edge.
And his mouth-she knew that mouth, the look of it, the feel of it. She knew his smile, and she knew his frown, and she knew-
she knew far to much. — Julia Quinn

It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me. — Iris Murdoch

I told you what I was when we began. I'm the black iris watered by poison. The wolf that raised its head among sheep and devoured its way, ruthless and bloody, to freedom. I never forgave, never forgot.
I didn't feel sorry. I felt bad. As in bad girl, not guilty. And feeling bad made me feel so fucking good. — Leah Raeder

The world is always full of promise. — Iris Apfel

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I think people should express themselves more and not just buy what's in. While it can be very beautiful, and it may suit you perfectly, I'm sure it doesn't suit everyone in the same way. I like people who express themselves and are more individualistic. — Iris Apfel

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods. — Iris Murdoch

Like the walking iris, he was too much of a good thing, something nature can't allow for too long. — Julie Hockley

time. Some of my friends think that Finn is cracked, but — Iris Murdoch

Beauvoir lent Maheu a recent English novel she had enjoyed, The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen. She admired its independent heroine, Iris Storm. Maheu did not. 'I have no liking for women of easy virtue,' he told her. 'Much as I like a woman to please me, I find it impossible to respect any woman I've had.' Beauvoir was indignant. 'One does not HAVE an Iris Storm! — Hazel Rowley

Don't kiss me again," she begged softly as she stood. — Iris Blobel

I can't tell people how to have style. No amount of money can buy you style. It's just instinctive. — Iris Apfel

I don't dress to be stared at. I dress for myself. — Iris Apfel

Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up. — Jane Smiley

We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. 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. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention. — Iris Murdoch

I absolutely consider fashion a form of art. Of course, there is some fashion that is not art at all - it's utilitarian, made for the purpose of covering up. And there are a lot of people out there who put a lot of effort into looking awful. But there are also people putting the same amount of energy into making bad art. — Iris Apfel

Iris from sea brings wind or mighty rain. — Empedocles

As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer's mind. — Iris Murdoch

My mother worshipped at the alter of accessories and I got the bug. She always said, if you have a good, little, simple black dress and you have different accessories, you can have 27 different outfits. — Iris Apfel

Humor is important in everything. Dress with a little humor and you can go a long way. — Iris Apfel

Whatever is not commonly seen is condemned as alien. — Iris Chang

What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school? — Iris Murdoch

All these things we had long since forgotten she gathered up one by one in her hands, caressing and warming them until they came back to life. It was as if she had come in place of the goddess of the rainbow to offer her grace and affection. She was perhaps the only one who ever truly loved the Hotel Iris. — Yoko Ogawa

I guessed that one day the restrictions I imposed on myself would end. But first, it seemed that my range of possible activities would have to iris down to zero before I could turn myself around. Then, when I was static and immobile, I could weigh and measure every exterior force and, slowly and incrementally, once again allow the outside in. And that would be my life. — Steve Martin

An experience is richest not talked of. — Iris Murdoch

Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection. — Iris Murdoch

I had to be my own person and live my own life if I wanted to be happy, and I just did it. — Iris Apfel

Praying
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak. — Mary Oliver

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. — Iris Murdoch

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. — Iris Murdoch

I've always loved to help people, young people in particular. — Iris Apfel

Every artist is an unhappy lover. — Iris Murdoch

But now you have another problem. Keeping him from exploding like a live granade and blitzing all of us." He started walking down the hall. "I've already had a little taste of that and I'm not willing to stand for it again. I'm patient, I'm not a martyr. Fix it Eve. — Iris Johansen

Confession ran in the family. — Iris Murdoch

When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out. — Iris Chang

It's more important to be happy than well-dressed. — Iris Apfel

I always feel that if you're gonna be uncomfortable and unhappy in something, just because you think it's in or it's chic, I would advise you to be happy rather than well-dressed. It's better to be happy. — Iris Apfel

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge. — Iris Murdoch

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern ... — Iris Murdoch

Iris Krasnow has managed to demystify the workings of long-term marriages by confirming the mysterious uniqueness of each one. The secret, she finds, lies in the way two people negotiate their own personal amalgam of companionship and sex, compromise and disappointment, lust and tenderness, trust and lies. The challenge for the rest of us is to do the same. — Suzanne Braun Levine

white calla lily has one petal; euphorbia has two; iris, lily and trillium have three; buttercup, columbine, larkspur pinks and wild rose have five; bloodroot and delphiniums, eight; black-eyed Susan, corn marigold, cineraria, ragwort and some varieties of daisies have thirteen; some aster, chicory and Shasta daisy, twenty-one; field daisies, plantain, and pyrethrum, thirty-four (on average); Michaelmas daisies and the stereaceae family have fifty-five and eighty-nine petals. Perhaps you could spend your next summer vacation checking out the veracity of this statement! — V. Raghunathan

Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "It just is."
Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. — Aldous Huxley

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch

We have to keep in mind that it's not just about the numbers of people who died; it's also the manner which many of these victims met their deaths. — Iris Chang

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us. — Iris Murdoch

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. — Iris Murdoch

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country? — Iris Chang