Quotes from Iris Murdoch

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

You daren't think, so you live in a dream.

Of course I love Arnold, but I can hate him too, and it can go along with love that one never forgives certain things.

Perhaps this 'dead' feeling was also brought on by an intensification of her old secret sorrow. Perhaps one day this sorrow might end. But she did not think it would end or see how it could end.

Here I am, after all, welcome home, I'm yours. To which Henry replied: When I wanted you you were not mine, when I needed you you rejected me. Why should I cherish you now?

He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.

You're such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You're a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.

Sometimes one has got to become monstrous in order to survive.

It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.

I must think of him as vanished utterly and gone forever.

I shall not attempt here to describe my marriage. Some impression of it will doubtless emerge. For the present story, its general nature rather than its detail is important. It was not a success. At first I saw her as a life-bringer. Then I saw her as a death-bringer. Some women are like that. There is a sort of energy which seems to reveal the world: then one day you find you are being devoured. Fellow victims will know what I mean. Possibly I am a natural bachelor.

It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure.

All this had happened before, perhaps a million times, and because of this was doomed. There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented terrified present. The future had passed through the present like a sword. We were already, even eye to eye and lip to lip, deep in the horrors to come.

I am not a very nice character. You must get to know me some time.

Look Moy, see the chimneys, they've lit all the fires, they must have known we were going to try to drown ourselves. And Anax is running on ahead to bring the news.

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning, and that is what I am experiencing just now.

Coming events do cast shadows.

There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.

And could it be true without other awful things being true as well?

A few people paused to look at him, but Londoners were by now so accustomed to 'weirdies' of all kinds that his ritual aroused little interest.

Magic besieges the religious life and men yearn to speak the language of angels.

However one must ask not just, is it amusing, is it exciting, but is it a work of art?

You can't go through the looking-glass without cutting yourself.

You don't know what it is to want a man, any man. I wish I could discover some respectable male prostitutes, like civil servants or university dons who do it in their spare time for a bit of pocket money, there must be such people.