Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Po?i auzi marea? - ?sta era citatul favorit din Shakespeare, a lui Keats.

It was not a very pleasant face: heavy, perceptibly Jewish, and dour, with just a hint of insolence.

I tasted injustice and the special horror of seeing its perpetrators flourish. How frequent and how bitter is this aspect of human wretchedness. The wicked prosper in front of our eyes and go on and on and on prospering. What a blessing it must have been once to be able to believe in hell. A great and deep human consolation was lost to us when that ancient and respectable belief faded from our minds.

Only a fool despises tomato ketchup.)

Yes, and I'm ready to wade through blood for him, but there is no blood, only a false sickly slime — I can't live in fogs and falsehoods, I must live in the open, I must find my way out, I must find someone else, and I have found someone else.

Rosina had the fierce charm of the rather nasty girl in the fairy-tale who fails to get the prince, but is more interesting than the girl who does, and has better lines too.

As she handed it over Dr Klein gave me a keen look. Her narrow dark eyes, which seemed in the strange light to be shot with red, had the slightly Oriental appearance peculiar to certain Jewish women.

I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one inexplicably and yet certainly loves A and is indifferent to B.

Were they waltzing, at that fleeting moment which the camera seized and tossed on into the future? Her feet seem scarcely to touch the dance floor.

All that had seemed impossible, too late, a dream, had suddenly become possible, even natural and inevitable.

The painter copies this bed from one point of view. He is thus at three removes from reality. He does not understand the bed, he does not measure it, he could not make it.

What a bore for you," I said, and I smiled to myself. Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

These words had impressed Clement deeply, inscribed upon his heart.

Although he longed to see Louise, and to see Aleph, he increasingly lacked the will to go.

Art both expresses and gratifies the lowest part of the soul, and feeds and enlivens base emotions which ought to be left to wither.

Verá usted, todo empezó con unas cartas. —¿Cartas? —Si, los seres humanos deberían tener muchísimo más cuidado con las cartas. Son unas armas muy poderosas. Sin embargo, la gente las escribe en momentos de emoción y quienes las reciben no las destruyen.

It ceased at last, as everything dreadful has to cease, even if it ceases only by death.

I've got to see you, I've got to talk about her, I shall go mad.

Her anger was against herself, for her frivolity and her blindness.

The painter and the writer are not just copyists or even illusionists, but through some deeper vision of their subject-matter may become privileged truth tellers.

There are indeed many places where I could start. I might start with Rachel's tears, or Priscilla's. There is much shedding of tears in this story. In a complex explanation any order may seem arbitrary. Where after all does anything begin? That three of the four starting points I have mentioned were causally independent of each other suggests speculations, doubtless of the most irrational kind, upon the mystery of human fate.

There are those who, even if valued, remain sinister witnesses from the past. James is for me such a witness. It is not even clear whether we like each other. If I were told today that James was dead my first emotion might be pleasurable; though how much does this prove?

There is also the evident dualism between those who know (the jargon, made of discourse etc.) and those who do not, who are not really using language but being used by it.

time. Some of my friends think that Finn is cracked, but