Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Happy love undoes the self and makes the world visible. Unhappy love is, or can be, a revelation of pure suffering.

We're just living on our emotions and eating each other.

Lucas hated other people, and also hated himself.

There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhapsfreedom has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us.

The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.

I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.

Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.

Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.

But now her tears dried because so many terrible emotions and speculations demanded her attention.

Even the few whom we genuinely adore we have to belittle secretly now and then, as Toby and I had to belittle James, just to feed the healthy appetite of our wondrously necessary egos.

Oh Irina, there's so much life for us. Is there? I feel I have no life. There's nothing in front of me but a black wall.

You've got to see me , Martin. I'm to blame. I've never been quite and entirely myself with you. The situation didn't let me be. The untruthfulness infected everything. I must break out a little? Do you see at all?

The virtues have secret names: they are, so difficult of access, secret things. Everything that is worthy is secret.

I said, Your brother is in bed with my wife. I added, I just took them up some wine in bed.

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

I must proceed to my next mystery and for the moment forget this one completely.

Or was some act of revenge still pending, some thunderbolt long cherished and prepared?

What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air? We both felt its presence.

We just drifted apart . . . I began to find his company extremely tiring . It was extremely tiring, but we were all addicted to it.

How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?

That's how vile I am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish! I think I hate Ireland more than I hate the theatre, and that's saying something!

I know her by intuition as if she were inside my head.

Only stories and magic really endure.