Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage…

I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle , now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art.

The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. The short path is the only path but it is very steep.

My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. 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?

I can't see how anything can ever happen to us — I mean, I feel as if, if we leave this place, we shall crumble to pieces.

I wonder if it's harder to be good in this age?

I'm falling in love with you again, most terribly in love. I've never been out of love with you, never for a second.

She must not be tempted by truthfulness, she must play the game out to the end.

Give yourself to these great works of art. They suffice for a lifetime.

What emotion had so invaded me? Fear? It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers. The naming of it is sometimes unimportant, sometimes crucial.

How absolute the knave is!

Where's your house?' 'Kempsford Gardens, by West Brompton tube station.

Is your father writing a book? said Alison. No. He's existing. Some people live, like the rest of us, like the people in your plays. He just exists.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of 'Help me!' — but there was no one there.

darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect.

Dora watched him for a while, nervously, and then returned to scanning the whole group. Seeing them all together like that she felt excluded and aggressive, and Noel's exhortations came back to her. They had a secure complacent look about them: the spiritual ruling class; and she wished suddenly that she might grow as large and fierce as a gorilla and shake the flimsy doors off their hinges, drowning the repulsive music in a savage carnivorous yell.

We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

One can't stop people from killing themselves if they're determined to. It may even be wrong to do so.

Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

I'm afraid you're all mixed up in my mind,' I said. 'I wonder where they are now –' 'Married.' She spoke it as if it were the name of a distant country.

but it was love in an inferno: that terrible relentless withholding of forgiveness.

But she felt that she had to see him or she would die.

So art becomes not communication but mystification.