Quotes from Iris Murdoch

I just don't know what's going to happen. All I know is that whatever it is it's got to happen. Next week.

I have lived for nearly ninety years and I know nothing.

What was to change many lives happened, and happened very fast in the next moments.

If only one could believe that death was waking up.

I was asked rather suddenly to join a delegation going to China, early October (alas John couldn't come because of Oxford term). (Another member was David Attenborough, the very nice animal TV man.)

solitary sinister men with terrible secrets — of whom Clement now and forever after must be one.

Comenzar una novela es como abrir la puerta o un paisaje neblinoso; ves muy poco, pero hueles la tierra y sientes el soplo del viento.

He felt removed from reality.

That too was part of a machine from which she had not, for all her 'feelings' and her 'principles', the spirit or the courage really to escape.

When dealing with a married couple one can never be neutral. The hot magnetic power of each one's view of the other makes the spectator sway.

The police moved us on at about six a.m. This is the hour when, for some reason, one begins to be a menace to law and order.

How we tracked him, you most of all of course, and lost him and found him.

I have always wanted to kill you, ever since the moment when I learnt of your existence.

You're always wanting to be forgiven. What do you want to be forgiven for?

He had to go there because of Patrick; and because it was fated. Yes, that gave him courage, to feel that he had not sought it, it had come upon him, and however fruitless or disastrous that journey might be, he had to undertake it, because it was his fate.

I'm sorry, I'm not myself. Or rather I am myself, my new self.

One's mind is such an old rubbish heap. All sorts of little bits of machinery start up.

It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was left with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of punishment which would perhaps yet find its hour.

Our relationship in fact was never idle. It was obvious that we constantly thought about each other.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better. Life

But by now anything was better than hope.

We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.

I thought it might make him despair of life, but he has despaired anyway.

We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them.