Quotes from Iris Murdoch

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

If the fates were arranging things, it was better to leave it entirely to them.

What I really wanted just then was to put Georgie in cold storage. It is unfortunate that other human beings cannot be conveniently immobilized.

A human being hardly ever thinks about other people.

With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes consolation in the end.

But all this, all this shift and change, thought Bellamy, is part of the vast lie which surrounds me and wherein I move from one fantasy to another. I wanted to escape to solitude and darkness in a holy place, but the dark is just the old dark of meaninglessness and falsehood, which separates me from my friends and from the real world where people love and help each other.

Bellamy was sorry to hurt Clement's feelings, but he so intensely wanted to be alone where he could confront the awful cacophony of his own feelings.

The flat was small and smelt of ancient things with which Gildas had not contended. In the sitting room shadowy photographs of Italian lakes had been hung high up by a previous tenant.

Oh Christ, if I could only have some happiness.

Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.

Send anger and hate away. Love them and let them walk on you.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. How offensive it can be, the natural instinctive showing off of decent happy people.

It was dark now. A thin moon was visible, a bright portent, but giving no light.

I am the nonsense priest of the nonsense god!

Since parting company with the priesthood he could almost be said to have become demoralised. Almost, for somehow he remained someone, a slightly mysterious someone, whom they respected, and they gave him the benefit of every doubt.

I'm just one long disappointment.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too.

Cambridge by moonlight was light blue and brownish black. There was no mist here and a great vault of clear stars hung over the city with an intent luxurious brilliance. It was the sort of night when one knows of other galaxies. My long shadow glided before me on the pavement. Although it was not yet eleven o'clock the place seemed empty and I moved through it like a mysterious and lonely harlequin in a painting: like an assassin.

How much harm, eddying outward in fateful circles, Clement was beginning to foresee.

The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe.

I was perhaps moreover a little the dupe of that illusion of lovers that the beloved object must , somehow, respond, that an extremity of love not only merits but compels some return.

I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling, I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness.

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

The sea, the sea, yes,' James went on. 'Did you know that Plato was descended from Poseidon on his father's side? Do you have porpoises, seals?' 'There are seals, I'm told. I haven't seen any.