Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Do you think it's ever safe to say one's happy?

There may be no God, but there's decency and - and there's truth and trying to stay there, I mean to stay in it, in its sort of light, and trying to do a good thing and to hold onto what you know to be a good thing even if it seems stupid when you come to do it.

She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.

Ignorance I know – 'innocence' I imagine is just a word.

I'm afraid I don't know their address, but there it is, when people are gone they're gone, isn't it.

Suppose she never got into art school, suppose she was not a painter after all? Suppose the talents which others had persuaded her she possessed were to abandon her overnight, or turn out to have been unreal all the time? Suppose she had to take a typing course or live with a word processor? I would die, she thought, I would kill myself or make myself die of grief. Already there was one great deep grief in her life.

It seemed to echo away into the hidden spaces and honeycombs of the dark.

Every man is betrayed by his mother.

There's nothing wrong with pornography. It's good for you. If politicians stuck to pornography the world wouldn't be in such a mess.

He awoke the next morning to an instant consciousness of disaster.

It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.

And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

Adelaide cooked a plain dinner since neither Will nor Auntie ever knew what they were eating and Will thought interest in food was bourgeois.

The had met at a party. Falling in love surprised them both.

Over the bed hung the picture of her beloved, the Polish Rider. He was looking, with his authoritative pensive mouth and his calm wide-apart eyes, past Moy, over her left shoulder and away into some vast distance. He was a knight upon a quest. He was brave, innocent, chaste, good.

That love all belonged to the elapsed moment.

She has lost the instinct for happiness.

He thought, I haven't got much longer before some sort of collapse. He could not think if this would be a collapse of mind or of body. Mind and body seemed utterly fused now in cold aching pain, and darkness.

What do you want for Christmas?' 'A loaded revolver.

Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go on and on and nothing would stop it. And no one from now on for ever would know how much he suffered and what it was really like to be him. How can I bear it, he thought, how can I go on bearing it without becoming something savage and awful?

Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning

Her solemn face of a Hebrew angel regarded me, ready, stripped of expression.

The loss of her reason did not seem to have made her unhappy