Iris Murdoch Quotes

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.

confession ran in the family.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.

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.

there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.

It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--''Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.