Quotes from Iris Murdoch

She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.

If only he could be loved by somebody new.

there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart

But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.

Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet. Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end. So the critics are just stupid? It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.

It's all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it's all too hard.

All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes

A woman in love is a great spiritual force.

Nothing will bring me peace except revenge.

Sometimes he would have liked to pray, but what is prayer if there is nobody there?

A really malicious letter should be read once only and destroyed, or best of all not read at all. These things lodge in the mind.

It's much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it.

But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.

I'm not like other people, my life just doesn't work, it never has.

Today we will read love poetry. You shall read aloud to me and we will weep together.

Anyway, as you say, what the hell. I know, I've been to hell, I've seen it, I've been shown round. I'll kill myself. You'll see, you'll be sorry.

Brooding about the past is so often fantasy of how one might have won and resentment that one didn't. It is that resentment which one so often mistakes for repentance

But suicides are mysterious, and one must respect their mystery.

He is crammed full of rage and hate and desire for revenge.

Why does one never see dead birds? How can they all hide to die?

She did not want to be as before. She wanted great changes in her life.

Of what value after all is a power which one could never use, or at any rate did not know how to use?

But the tomorrow upon which I was to make my decision never, in the form in which I had envisaged it, arrived.

It's madness — Madness is where we live now.