Quotes from Iris Murdoch

I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent.

How mysterious night and day are, this endless procession off dark and light....I think such sad thoughts - of people in trouble and afraid, all lonely people all prisoners.

How can we not be dooms to each other?

She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.

I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

You're as wonderful as I expected, and I worship you for it.

Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.

You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.

I'm sorry I was awful. I'm so full of terrors.

Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong?

Patchway had the enviable countryman's capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease.

Oh if only only only we could be happy and ordinary like other people.

I would like to send you to hell. My dear, I live in hell, and have done so since I was a small child. Since I regained my mind I have thought, and dreamt too, of nothing but of killing you. You can do it any time, if you don't mind going to prison.

He could go back and take her in his arms. If only he knew how to do this. But they had lost the language of their affections, they had lost the style.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart, was something I had not experienced with any other woman.

Better keep such things decently buried.

What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence. It was a long time since I had received anything resembling a love letter.

The whole thing, the way it all happened, was shattering. And what it shattered most of all was some conception I'd had of myself, some wholeness.

The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.

It had occurred, it had happened , and could never in his life be unhappened, never removed, a huge deadly black scar lasting forever.

You rail on us all for not being saints. Yes, yes, yes. And when I stop that railing I shall be dead. It is the only thing I know and I shall cry it out again and again, like a tedious little bird with only one song.

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

Perhaps one could not live with such knowledge. One might die for it, or of it.