Quotes from Iris Murdoch

I can't see why anyone would want to go on living when they've got like that. Whatever can he look forward to?' 'The next drink.' 'Well, you would! I think old age is awful. I hope I'll never be old.

Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not 'in love'. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, love me enough.

Even as I write these words, which should be lucid and filled with glowing colour, I feel the very darkness of my own personality invading my pen. Only perhaps in the ink of this darkness can this writing properly be written? It is not really possible to write like an angel, though some of our near-gods by heaven-inspired trickery sometimes seem to do it.

No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.

Why did I ever leave them, what was I fleeing from? What spoilt scene that I could not then endure?

How could he assess her like this because of something which had happened in the past? The past was never real for Dora. The notion that Paul might keep her past alive to torment her with, now occurred to her for the first time.

One should never tell anything to somebody who won't think about it right. Or is this too timid a doctrine?

How little perhaps can words convey except in the hands of a genius.

It was too late to go back. There was a hand which could never, in grace and healing, be laid upon him now.

But I've had such a rotten life. People like me are a problem .

Eros and Thanatos: a false pair and a true pair.

But I have, I suppose, become through the power of love, awful, relentless.

I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.

The best you can hope for is a little peace and not too much remorse. Thoughts at peace under an English heaven.

All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable.

I'm terribly in love with you. But please don't worry about it.

All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

He felt indestructible because destroyed.

A human being is a morass, a swamp, a jungle.

An ever-increasing family of tabbies, sprung from one enormous matriarch, sit about upon the counter and on the empty shelves, somnolent and contemplative, their amber eyes narrowed and winking in the sun, a reluctant slit of liquid in an expanse of hot fur.

Yet the love is there, the love is there — only it's as if it's so wounded it has curled up and gone into a black hole.

The absence of the loved person is so absolute.

He had lived throughout upon magic, upon romantic love in its fullest sense, and this magic, now that she was gone, seemed sometimes likely to kill him.

She had loved him, she thought now, because, just at that time, she had had to have something else, someone else, to love, a private place for wounded love to go. But that had been, as she had then suspected and now knew, a device, a dream.