Quotes from Iris Murdoch

I must tell her, but later, later, later, when it's all long finished and no longer an agony.

But he's joking, he doesn't mean it. When Lucas makes a joke he means it.

Understanding was out of the question; and indeed how passionately, just then, I did not want to be understood.

Ducane knew that Willy had looked forward to this visit. He knew too that the visit was rendering Willy unspeakably miserable.

Everyone must go his own way, Jake,' said Hugo. 'Things don't matter as much as you think.

We'll see you through, Martin, said Antonia . . . So do not be guilty or worried, darling Martin. I won't be guilty or worried, I'll be raving mad, I said. I don't want you to see me through. I want to be left alone by both of you at long last.

The false god punishes, the true god slays.)

We must keep this love uncontaminated even if we kill it.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after;

There had been a slaughter of all my other interests, and upon the strange white open scene of the future only one thing remained.

You understand nothing of—the horror—no wonder you can't write real books—you don't see—the horror—

How had this weird idea been conceived, how had it grown until it seemed inevitable?

Of course she had read this work many times before, but there were certain parts to which she passionately returned: so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible. As she read tears began to stream down her face.

Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world.

How could two such different worlds co-exist, how could they communicate?

You know as well as I do that one can be imprisoned in one's mind.

Do anything you like . . . only don't say the word 'never'. I should die of that word.

the superiority of some infinite reserve and the mystery of some infinite sadness.

It occurred to me as scandalous that Palmer and Antonia, after the scene in which I had taken part in the drawing-room, should have gone out to the opera. Antonia ought to have been waiting for me to come back. I resented this indifference to the tempo of my own drama.

Christ, I loathe women. But I can't get going on the other tack either. And you needn't blush and look coy, I never fancied you. I know what you got up to with Fritzie Eitel! No—but I'd have had old Wilfred if he'd asked me. What did old Wilfred do for sex? No one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't have any, and if so good on him.

Charles, don't destroy yourself, said James. Why are you always so intent on breaking everything that surrounds and supports you?

I prayed that all might be well between me and Hartley, that somehow that lifelong faithful remembering, what I now thought of as my mystical marriage, might not be lost or wasted, but somehow come to good!

What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man's searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand.

She committed her energies to the Labour Party in 1944 but expressed disappointment with its leaders, complaining to David Hicks in May of 'the usual lack of unity and intelligent leadership on the left'. To her surprise and delight, however, the Labour Party swept to victory in July 1945.