Quotes from Iris Murdoch

All dreams are sinister.

But I've got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn't understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I'm mangled in a machine. Even to say it's my own fault doesn't mean anything.

Well, you won't abandon me, will you. Don't be silly, Ludens, you are buckled to my heart.

But, and especially with Linda's help, he had decided that, like most other people, he was not made for reality.

Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.

The human mind is a weird place.

Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of.

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

And this great love makes you both ruthless .

Our planet is a freak which we shall destroy by our own wicked senseless activities in the next century. Our history will very soon come to an end. Now that God is dead, we are at last presented with the truth, yes, the truth remains, but it is on a short lead. Anyway, we are nothing and it matters not what we do.

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.

I might say too that you are the person who ought to help me, since you do bear some responsibility for having awakened in me such an immense, such a truly monstrous degree of love.

He was glad she had come; she was for him, as he for her, 'another place'.

I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.

Girls don't want men to be quiet and gentle, I'm told. If you're not panting with impatient lust they think you're not interested.

Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one's weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.

I adore your jealousy, especially when it's so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.

You know when things get inside you and you can't stop going round and round the same piece of misery.

In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide.

Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.

He felt himself falling into a state, very common when he was younger, of being totally cut off from the society he was in.

Was it unpleasant? I don't know, I said. Everything is so unpleasant nowadays it's hard to tell.

I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?

That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom.