Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Clement, usually a fluent speaker in any situation, could hear his voice assuming a pompous and affected tone, not unlike that which many actors use (wrongly in Clement's view) when playing Polonius.

Labour in power?

To be good is just never to lose it. How does evil begin in a life? How can it begin? Yet we were there once.

Everyone seemed to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed except me.

Well, everything's nicer when you can think about Christmas.

And what is love anyway? Love's all over the mountain where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it's something you've invented now.

We did not exist all that much. We could suffer like mad all the same. Something was there, a wounded complex of resentment and anxiety and pain, something half crushed, something swallowed, not yet digested, and still screaming.

Everything is full of gods

Willy seemed like an inhabitant of some other dimension who could only tenuously communicate with the ordinary world. This would have troubled her less if she had not imagined his other dimension as a place of horror.

He had always thought of himself as a muddler, a sufferer, a victim.

Every night is an imitation of death. Without that I would have killed myself long ago.' She

But you are metaphysical, Otto. You ought to think about her in more simple terms.

At Cambridge I took minor (John major) part in a Virginia Woolf centenary conference. As I hadn't read any VW since school (possibly college) days, I felt bound to reread at least all the novels. It's super to wake up now in the morning and realise I don't have to read a Virginia Woolf novel today. I am prepared to admire some of the stuff but do not like either it or her

Parvati's oriental ability to see that everything was, from a certain point of view, everything else, baffled and charmed his Aristotelian western mind.

Enormous vistas of thought were unrolling in my mind.

Now that the doors of possibility had magically opened one after the other, Ludens realised how much comfort he had derived from uncertainty.

How strange that behind a smiling chattering mask one may rehearse in the utmost detail pictures and conversations which constitute torture, that behind that mask one may weep, one may howl.

Perhaps his demons were quite other.

where an iron bedstead was wrapped in stillness.

All, all of a piece throughout: Thy Chase had a Beast in view: Thy Wars brought nothing about; Thy Lovers were all untrue. 'Tis well an Old Age is out, And time to begin a New. DRYDEN: THE SECULAR MASQUE

Oh why is she going away just when I want so much to be with her! She is the answer to the riddle of my life.

I do wish you could be happy. If I thought you could be happy I could simply cease to exist with a sigh of joy.

I tried to think these thoughts but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real.

But the poem was a Liebestod and although art cannot but console for what it weeps over, the completion of the poem left him sour and sick and utterly convinced of the henceforward impossibility of love.