Quotes from Iris Murdoch

There are eternal bonds which are made in registry offices and in churches, there are eternal bonds which are made in other and stranger and more terrible ways.

I have always wanted to kill you, all my life led to that blow. Jealousy and hatred compose my earliest memories. I have killed you every day in my thoughts.

It's so sad, all our house seems broken apart, everyone is going.

And suffering we know breeds images, it breeds the most beautiful images of all.

You are sad. I am always sad.

She thought, this is the end of happiness, darkness begins here.

He felt sad, sad.

But the spark vanished, there was no longed-for recognition, no dawning sign of recovery. The love she had learnt in tending him was an enclosed love, muted and maimed, already mourning. They would never communicate now.

Extreme continuing unhappiness often consoles itself with images of death which may in a sense be idle, but which can play a vital part in consolation and also in the continuance of illusion. If that happens I am dead, consoles, and also dulls the edge of speculation and even of conscience. It is another way of saying, to me that cannot happen.

Of course we have an 'unconscious mind' and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a 'scientific' one.

The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?

She could not bear the tenderness which a dog would evoke, she did not want the pain of another love. She knew how very much, how desperately, she would love her dog; and dogs are vulnerable and short-lived and die.

She tells so many different stories and they are all false.

When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one.

But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.

Your best friends are in trouble and you say 'of course' and forget them instantly.

I am really in love and it's a terrible experience.

Who is one's first love? Who indeed.

You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.

none of these things had really got to happen at all, since she could prevent them. The power of pure destruction was still hers. She could still make it death or glory.

Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.

And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.

And now in her deep heart an even sharper pain was stirring, a pain which would stay with her always.

She stopped thinking so as not to cry