Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there?' Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part.

The unspoken words trembled in the air.

I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn't know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long.

To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate.

Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that.

Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations.

Sometimes one feels suddenly doomed by fate.

Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off.

We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.

You can't magic yourself out of the situation, you've got to live it as decently and as grimly as you can.

I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.

You see, nobody cares about me except you. You don't know what that's like. You've always had people who cared. You've always had people . I've never had anybody. No wonder I feel frustrated.

Tell her I was young once and star-bright Who am now invisible . . .

And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations.

It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.

I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody . . . And it precludes any real loyalty to anybody.

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.

Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth Great art is able to display and discuss the central area of our reality, our actual consciousness, in a more exact way than science or even philosophy can.

He can do anything he likes and I'm so lonely, oh so lonely— And I put up with it because there was nothing else to do—

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.

Forgive me for not being able to be with you.

I crave for love, everybody does . . . and I've never had a bloody crumb of it—and I've given so much love to people—I can really love people, I can, I let them walk over me—but nobody's ever loved me.

How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.

Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.