Quotes from 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.

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

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.

I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them.

Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.

To say we were 'in love', that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain?

You've got such nice hair, it seems a pity to dye it blue.

You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptiness. And of this you make a virtue.

I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow—I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on . . . I'm so Christ-awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end.

Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.

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

I need daylight. But I wander in the dark.

Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable.

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.

You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.

The agony was of suddenly feeling herself so separate and so secret.

The trouble with people nowadays is they don't know how to do nothing.

Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of.

I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.

Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent or come to doubt their own wit.

The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.

There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage.

Was this strange mode of life to go on and on?

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.