Quotes from Iris Murdoch

She thought, perhaps I am simply mad. It will grow worse. That will be my life.

If you want to eat spaghetti you must use your teeth.' Wittgenstein. I don't think Wittgenstein really said any of those things you say he said!

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as 'prisoners'.

Prose literature can reveal an aspect of the world which no other art can reveal … and in the case of the novel, the most important thing to be thus revealed, not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist.

Do you really believe that? That it's wicked to love destiny? Yes. What happens is usually what oughtn't to happen. Why love it?

Ludens felt again that special curious anguish caused by glimpses of a happiness he would have felt if only things were different — which could be different, perhaps could easily be different — but somehow maddeningly were not.

In a way it does not matter where I am. In another way where I am is fated.

I have never lived in Ireland, though I retain a sentimental sense of connexion with that poor bitch of a country.

And he could not help being a little bit cheered up and consoled as he got into the Bentley and set off alone for Oxford.

That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad. Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance.

Wittgenstein has created a void into which neo-Kantianism, existentialism, utilitarianism have made haste to enter.

To describe one's character is difficult and not necessarily illuminating. The story which follows will reveal, whether I will or no, what sort of person I am.

But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.

Some inner organ would give way, her heart would literally break, if she did not see him soon.

Death contradicts ownership and self.

I can decide what to say but not what the words mean which I have said. I can decide what to do but I am not master of the significance of my act.

He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him.

Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.

He had for many years now been spared the demons, though he was constantly aware of their continued presence. He could hear them, as it were, moving behind the wall. They belonged to him and would doubtless go with him to the grave. His mind too, like David's, ran irresistibly to the horror.

The wound with which she travelled vibrated within her. She thought, I shall never have what I desire. I shall become bitter and defeated and dim, and I shall never really paint, I am a freak, a crippled animal, something to be put down, put to sleep, put out of its misery.

When one is very close to Truth itself, truthfulness vanishes.

Now let us leave this place, it is rather eerie.

We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)