Quotes from Iris Murdoch

But I had come to where I had never been before, the blessed point of sufficient desperation.

Are we not somehow compelled by love? I shall not let one day pass without giving you the assurance of mine. Surely there is a future for us together. I am yours yours yours.

I see him as a god from elsewhere who has lost his way . . .

You just seem to have folded up the future. It is folded up.

a meadow which David had known before the coming of the motorway, where he had searched for mushrooms in previous autumns, in lost quiet golden hazes.

Happiness. What's that? I don't know. How can one be happy when one loves a demon?

The grass on the other side of the road was a pullulating emerald green, the rocks that grew here and there among the grass were almost dazzlingly alight with little diamonds. The warm air met me in a wave, thick with land smells of earth and growth and flowers.

There was as much emotion generated between them now as if they had been lovers.

It's terrible that one doesn't love people forever.

The calmness was the final tone of despair.

How irrevocably spoilt, down to its minutest detail, his world was now. Even the countryside was spoilt, the animals, the birds, the flowers. There was nowhere to run to.

She has somehow missed the bus of life.

He wanted to be a universal man . . . and I suppose that isn't possible now. He belongs in fifteenth-century Italy. This age doesn't suit him.

I don't like you, I love you. You're a portent for me, a sign. I've always lived by signs.

He said, 'Forgive me for being a liar and a fool and an utterly worthless man.' Louise replied, 'I love you.' He took her in his arms for a moment and they held each other with closed eyes.

If only it were over, done, without the awful doing of it.

He felt as if something had been completed and he would never see any of those people again.

She shivered in the sunlight as if it were the ray of a malignant star.

There can scarcely be anything worse than surviving something which shatters your mind and leaves you obsessed with revenge.

I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life.

I had better spend the day quietly, sleep in the afternoon perhaps, and then start again hunting for Hugo. I would have much preferred to look for Anna. But I had no idea now where to start looking. Also I wanted to lay quickly to rest the terrible suspicion that where I found Hugo now I would also find Anna. This idea didn't bear thinking about and so I didn't think about it.

He had ceased to be interested in anyone but himself.

Since she had been looking after him she had felt bound to him by a strange silent love.

Sometimes I think he will become quite desperate — with the pain of simply being himself — he might do anything.