Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Why after two years at that university, he left to study sociology in Birmingham, no one knew clearly. He suddenly, as he said, 'couldn't stand Cambridge'. He wanted to get closer to something — perhaps life. But life continued to reject him.

The great evil, the dreadful evil, that which made war and slavery and all man's inhumanity to man lay in the cool self-justifying ruthless selfishness of quite ordinary people, such as Biranne, and himself.

She did not really mind not altogether enjoying it in bed.

Why have you LEFT POLITICS? LEFT POLITICS needs you!

He did not read. This continued to amaze Ludens who could not imagine existence without reading.

There is no light where I am. If any comes it is not enlightenment but lightning.

She thought, I shall die of misery and pain.

Then she thought, is this really all I have to look forward to, is this what I have to comfort myself with?

What is God anyway? A dark place —

O death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest. Let pass my weary guilty ghost out of my careful breast.

I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted.

I must return to my freedom which I now realise is something so essential that it makes my love for you seem like death.

It's not even like memory. It's all just there. All the time, Willy? Every hour, every minute.

One morning, one day, perhaps soon, she would come to him and find him gone; and she knew how much she did not want to see him die, and yet how much she also wished that he might die holding her hand. These thoughts induced tears, which he must not see; and she tried not to think too much about the terrible mystery which was to be enacted . . .

the huge machine of her misery.

One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying than the subject of death.

Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained.

Could she endure it, the long vigil of death made visible?

Yes, I've endured so much, and you seem to think this means I will endure anything. It does not.

Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.

But oh — time has become such a torture, a slow torture. One tries to capture a piece of time that lies ahead and is full of light . . . but thinking about that just makes this awful black time even blacker.

You say we don't know the consequences of actions. But we don't know the consequences of inactions either, and inactions are actions.

There are secret saints with strange destinies.

By the time she wrote The Sovereignty of Good in 1970 her criticism had become stringent: 'we are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy'.