Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation.

How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.

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.

The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not. I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve. But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.

Oh what a mad business, no good can come of it, only chaos, and not just chaos but evil. How did we gradually get entangled in such a terribly dangerous shambles!

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

Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself.

It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another.

Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.

The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings.

She thought sadly, gaiety and laughter are not in my destiny.

Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest.

I just can't live an ordinary life, I can't pass the time . I can't organise myself, I don't have ordinary motives any more. I can't even manage my body, when I go to bed I don't know where to put my arms.

You see, I'm not mad, I suffer from depression. It's not like ordinary misery. It's like dying of boredom. It's black .

No good would come of all these fine intentions.

Any society contains propaganda, but it is important to distinguish this from art and to preserve the purity and independence of the practice of art. A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.

I could not see other human beings at present.

I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.

He's had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.

There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so—crucial.

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others.

You can't kiss me and vanish.

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

Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so much society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows.