Quotes from Iris Murdoch

One's capacity to forget absolutely is immense.

There are false suns, easier to gaze upon and far more comforting than the true one.

But my wants are huge, my desires are rapacious, I want love, I want the splendour and violence of love, and I want it now, I want someone of my own.

A great sword pierced Sefton's heart. She too had loved Lucas with her own kind of deep secret love, and it seemed to her in this moment that, if he had asked her, she would have gone with him anywhere.

Year after year he wondered if he should go back and year after year felt it all recede from him past hope, past endeavour . . . He could not find his way back there.

Oh how stupid I am, he said to himself, using words which he had used ever so often since he was a child. At that moment it seemed to him that his life had consisted of one blunder after another, and now aged thirty-one he was well on into the stupidest of all.

Franca breathed the tranquility of the house, yet it was not tranquil, she breathed its goodness, but it was not good.

I have been on the whole a lucky man. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say it now.

She lived in private with her own horror.

How happy are those who believe that they can pray and be helped, or even, without being helped, be listened to.

She thought, I shall never tell it to Jack, the strange love which I feel for this doomed man, as if he were a dog lying in the road with a broken back.

Deep, deepest inside his wounded heart. he felt the new pain, the pain which would now travel with him always.

There are violent things in my heart. Perhaps they have been festering there ever since that change . And now I have run in here to find some different pain, some mystery of myself to keep secret, something which, for this short time, is absolutely not Jack.

I can't believe in your other attachment.

I am sunk in the wreck of myself . . . I live in myself like a mouse inside a ruin.

He wished he was not always young again in his dreams, it made waking up so sad.

How little thought he had given to her since, how little imagination of her feelings — and after the great honour which she had done him. She had offered him herself and said she loved him.

To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.

In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal . For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness.

He thought about the future and it was a vibrating darkness. He felt fear.

Izgubiti nekoga ne zna?i izgubiti samo osobu nego i sve one na?ine i oblike kroz koje se ta osoba izražavala; zato ?ovjek izgubivši voljenu osobu može odjednom otkriti da je izgubio i mnoštvo stvari, slika, stihova, pjesama i mjesta.

And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one's only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one's partners head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow!

It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.

In faith I know not why I am so sad. Ludens did not reply to this remark which Gildas often uttered.