Quotes from Iris Murdoch

God, how the young and beautiful vanish and are no more seen.

Las olas siempre regresan, [el mar] sus resacas, las mareas, las corrientes submarinas y las simas abismales. Y los monstruos que a veces salen a la superficie a saludarnos y a recordarnos que siguen ahí, esperando, aguardando." ? Iris Murdoch.

I was brimming with anger and hatred. I hated, not society, puny sociologists' abstraction, I hated the universe. I wanted to cause it pain in return for the pain it caused me.

Yet it was not that a rapture or a glory which had once shone around her had passed away from the world. The rapture and the glory whose hauntings she suffered had never manifested themselves in her life at all.

he would not attend at all to anything which did not interest him)

Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can't be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn't exactly a promise . . .

If Buddhists think evil is unreal they must be mad! Thinking evil is unreal is holding hands with evil under the table!

Her love for men had always been somehow neurotic and unfulfilled.

The madcap English weather which had been putting on a passable imitation of June now decided to play March.

Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of?

We all love a glimpse of Lucas, it's a religious experience.

With a fluency that amazed me lies and treachery streamed from my lips. I was in extreme pain.

I suspect the study of English literature is doing you no good, it's full of all sorts of romantic high-flown nonsense. You've been reading Shelley. I plead guilty to that crime.

Jealousy lasts forever. Bad news for the young.

I don't know what love can do for the terrible things of life.

There was a kind of sleeping or half-sleeping which I sometimes tried to achieve (especially at weekends) when I lay like a floating turtle, just breaking the surface of consciousness, aware and yet not self-aware, not yet tormented by being a particular person.

Only let the scene end soon and without any horrors.

What larks we had, said James. When? When we were young. I could not recall any larks I had had with James. I poured out the wine and we sat in silence.

I liked to live in other people's worlds and have none of my own.

We are all mad sometimes, but it passes. The consequences do not pass.

You're miserable by yourself, you just mope. Don't you, don't you?' 'I enjoy misery and moping.

To find someone — oh yes — that is the problem. To have mutual love, that is so difficult indeed.

The new world, he thought, the new life, and how sad it is. I suppose I should be congratulating myself, it may even be that later I shall look back on this as heaven.

Love can end. That's just one of the horrors of human life.