Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited?

I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge-eyed in the wreck of myself.

This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch's fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.

I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie.

True politics is simply the drying of tears and the endless fight for freedom. Without freedom there is no art and no truth. I revere great artists and the men who say no to tyrants.

I've felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face.

Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.

I feel so depressed. I have to be merry and bright while I just want to cry.

I can't tell you—oh I can't tell you—how awful—how sort of unlivable—everything is now—like a great black wall in front of me—Something's got to smash.

She thought, I am becoming a recluse. Yes, that's it, that is the way.

He looked so sad. I never saw him look sad before, he was always so superior, everywhere the king. You once called him a god from elsewhere who had lost his way.

It was all very simple. I just loved her. I couldn't stop. I haven't stopped. Oh God.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images'.

We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant.

You're doing your thing, why can't I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it.

Perhaps he has realised now that he's trapped here and has to suffer with us and become mortal and die.

I ceased some time ago to believe in goodness.

Anyway people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels.

I have battered destructively and in vain upon the mystery of someone else's life and must cease at last.

And he thought, I shall go on blindly and secretly jumbling all these things together and making no sense of them as long as I live. Maybe every human creature carries some such inescapable burden. That is being human. A very weird affair.

Like all inexperienced people, Toby tended to make all-or-nothing judgements.

I did not like the look of him at all. Something significantly ill-omened which I could not yet define emanated from him.

Clement held her hand for a moment; knowing that after that moment the darkness would begin.