Quotes from Iris Murdoch

As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?

He was extremely angry with Bellamy who had, when Clement needed him, refused to be with him.

This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence. It's not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was.

Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.

We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.

I must have been assuming that without me there it would be all cobwebs and desolation.

If I see her she may kill hope.

I've never had any luck, Brad. I don't even hope for any any more.

At this point Bellamy suddenly remembered another dream which at the time had made him smile. He dreamt he was a little tiny frightened animal called 'Spingle-spangle'. Later he did not smile. The little doomed creature was an image of what he most feared, insanity.

The place was still there, present in the sunshine, instead of being hidden far away in darkness in the confines of some tragic opera.

There was a sort of grey dripping figure that kept trying to rise up in my mind and which I ruthlessly violently banished.

It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent.

He had lived a chaste life really. It was his accusers and not his crimes which troubled him.

How soon we cover up the horror of death and loss, if we can, with almost any sort of explanation, as if we had to justify the very fate which had maimed us.

Please excuse this outpouring which perhaps makes no sense but is the utter darkness of my spirit pouring from me like black blood.

He could feel the pain of her heart beating strongly against his own.

She had never been filled with her love like a calm brimming vessel. She had rather suffered it, as a tree might suffer a cold wind, and the image of a coldness was somehow mingled with her memories of marital love.

Oh, all right, perhaps it wasn't all your fault, I was just doomed from the start.

I lit another cigarette and wondered distantly how I would get through the day. It was a problem demanding some ingenuity.

Mary did not believe in analysing herself, and she had left vague the notion that sometimes came to her that this anxious unfulfilled sort of loving was the only kind of which she was capable.

I feel I'm living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.

Ludens experienced, as an extra pain, an intimation of the happiness he might have felt in such a place.

And so my life has become tiny and mean and incomplete and I must begin it again without comfort and without magic.

I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.