Quotes from Iris Murdoch

She was dressed to go to bed only it was ridiculously early to go to bed. She desired to be unconscious.

I had the illusion of conversing with a fellow being without a barrier, without a steel door, without a black hood over my head . . . I have never, I think, impressed upon you how almost impossible I find it to communicate with anybody.

You talk of freedom — I've never had it! I've been lonely and miserable and in despair, and you want me to consent to all that all over again!

La gente no suele saber aplicar la filosofía. Dudo de que ni siquiera los filósofos sepan hacerlo. —La gente puede usar conceptos morales lo mismo que tú has usado ahora el concepto de la verdad para convencerme. Cualquiera puede hacerlo. —Quizá. Pero creo que la filosofía moral es algo que resulta desesperanzadamente personal. No puede ser comunicado. «Si un león hablase, no podríamos comprenderlo», ha dicho Wittgenstein.

Of course one never knows about other people's loves, and I would certainly never know about James's.

It is unfortunately for us both also the truth that I love you and only you utterly and permanently and to distraction.

There is so much grit in the bottom of the container, almost all our natural preoccupations are low ones, and in most cases the rag-bag of consciousness is only unified by the experience of great art or of intense love. Neither of these was relevant to my messy and absent-minded goings-on.

We may love our chains and our stripes too.

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.

But there are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.

There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shoulder-shrugging casualness committed at last.

The notion that 'it all somehow must make sense', or 'there is a best decision here', preserves from despair: the difficulty is how to entertain this consoling notion in a way which is not false.

I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before.

How fearful that dark shadow is when we catch sight of it in the life of another. No wonder those at whom that black arrow is aimed so often turn and flee. How unendurable it can be, the love another bears us. I would never persecute my darling with that dread knowledge. From now onward until the world ended everything must remain, although utterly changed, exactly as it was before.

I touched the Waterford glass with my finger: and in its ring I heard the echo of a voice saying You do not really want your wife back after all . I answered the voice in my heart: a bond of this kind is deeper and stronger than wanting or not wanting. Wherever I am in the world and whenever I am I shall always be Antonia.

It's not so easy. What isn't? To establish relationships, you can't just elect people, it can't be done by thinking and willing.

Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people - inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families - but these cases are also the least illuminating.

On this planet . . . many things are 'the rule' which are thoroughly evil and pernicious.

I just hope — if he does come — it won't be some sort of horror show.

I've not often been happy or thought it was in my stars.

Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.' 'Yours is a melancholy sort of religion, Dennis. I'm afraid I don't believe in God.' 'Ah, you do. But you do not know His name. And I who know His name am only the better of you by one little word. Here is the salmon pool.

I shook myself out of these dreams. There were places where my thoughts must not go; and as I then reflected how few places were left where they could now go without incurring pain or guilt I decided that I needed some more whisky.

I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart.