Quotes from Iris Murdoch

No! I can't leave him, I'm bound to him, I'm made of him, I am him!

I've somehow run myself into hell. There must be many entrances.

And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.

I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer.

This is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears, like the first centuries of the Christian era, it's an age of extreme solutions.

Sex comes to most of us with a twist.

Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools.

He did not touch her but enjoyed the particular intimate pain of the tension between them.

I did love her in a way, but it was under the sign of doom.

Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.

I was born to be nothing and to have nothing.

He suffers terribly all the time. He lives in fire.

There's no point in talking it over. It would only make things worse. There's nothing to say. I just love you. That's all of it. That's half of it, said Ducane. Possibly over dinner I might tell you the other half.

Sometimes I just feel so shut in, with all those people and they've all got something while I've got nothing.

I took him for a kind of buffoon. Now I see he is a devil.

And do stop sneezing. It annoys me so much when people sneeze.

And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.

I am just a past with no present.

The sending of a letter constitutes a magic grasp upon the future.

So, in a curious lurid calm which could not last and yet, it seemed, could not end, the days went by.

We shall meet, but as strangers. It is the end of an era. A whole part of my life is torn away.

But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.

Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time.

I saw . . . what I've really know all along, that you are my truth. For me you are the way the truth and the life. Only here can I be totally myself.