Quotes from Iris Murdoch

A less courageous person would have felt that it was too late, they would have felt ashamed, they would think wellI don't want this, I know I shall hate it, it's all wrong, but I'm so involved now I'll have to put up with it, and I know that later on I'll keep on wishing that I'd had the nerve to say no, even at the last minute....

Desperate for help, living his life now as a hideous dream, he had told nobody.

Decide what you want and go for it, Fred, it's just a matter of will power! I remember you saying that to me more than once.' I did not recall saying this nor did it sound like anything which anyone would say more than once, assuming he had ever had the misfortune to say it at all, but I was glad that Freddie had such rosy memories.

We did really love each other . . . didn't we? Didn't we? In the name of that reality — M.

As for me — there is another partner waiting for me, a teacher whom I knew long ago — his name is solitude. I am glad to be back here among my English friends . . . But I shall come back here to an empty flat and close the door, and I shall lean back against the door, as I recall I used to when I was young, and breathe deeply and feel the deep relief and liberation of coming home to solitude, coming home to myself .

He lay on his back listening to his mother's quiet snoring and thinking how increasingly awful his life was becoming. It was as if he were being squeezed out of the world.

It is not simply that suppression of self is required before accurate vision can be obtained. The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy. The direction of attention is, contrary to nature, outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability so to direct attention is love.

And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, forever.

Lovely country, isn't it. Do you know this part of the world? No. He said, suddenly stretching out his hands, Oh, the sea, the sea—it's so wonderful.

He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way.

Ludens felt that everyone around him was living in the present, a place where he certainly could not live.

What happened after that, and will be related later, was something entirely unexpected and so awful that Ludens had never spoken about it afterwards to anyone.

Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved.

I mean he's honest , he sees the terrible things, he doesn't try to cover them up or imagine them away — the evil of the world, the senselessness of it all, the rottenness of us ordinary people, our fantasy life, our selfishness —

You don't know what it's like to be me, you don't know what it's like to be all tattered and destroyed inside.

What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.

Now she did not even wish to try, for fear of rousing up something terrible.

The true rose, the miracle of nature, owed nothing to the hand of man.

He was attentive but impersonal, and esteemed rather than loved.

My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.

I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy.

His eyes closed now, and for a long time they sat quietly thus. Such was their lovemaking.

With the characteristic cunning of true love, she was already manipulating the future.

I don't think she's had much of a life. Well, a life is a life. What does that mean? One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It's only when one's young one expects otherwise.