Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Guilt is one way of attaching a meaning to a death. We want to find a meaning. It lessens the pain.

The apparent scene is slowly falling to pieces revealing the reality behind.

I'm totally unworthy of this love which you are offering to me.

Like Proust I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time into the coolness and poise of a work of art. (Agreeing with Huxley for once, I think it is not what one has experienced, but what one does with what one has experienced that matters. The only possible doctrine of course for one who has experienced remarkably little of the big world!)

In my experience a good row not only does not clear the air but can land you with a lifelong enemy.

The presence of so many things which ought to have delighted her and been her friends brought home to Moy how little delight she could now feel and how alienated she now was from all the beings to which she had once felt so close.

What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence.

Beveridgefn20 is a good thing though – that's all right, so long as people don't start relaxing with a sigh of relief. (I've just been reading Bev. – a fine piece of work – thorough and equitable – and it will be a good fight, trying to get it put into operation – doomed to failure I surmise, but instructive.)

Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection.

Of course, my dear, I cannot, how could I, altogether regret what has happened.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

Singing is of course a form of aggression.

Sudden things are prepared for.

Perhaps that was the only time which we should ever, ever have together. Perhaps it was something which would never, never, never come again.

What a terribly complex thing his life must be to be able so utterly to surprise its owner!

Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.

She dreamt she saw the Polish Rider passing slowly by and he was weeping and she called out to him, but he turned his head away. She dreamt that she was drowning in the pool of tears.

But these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel 'I shall never know'.

Had he gone eagerly to that rendezvous and was he now, in what strange heaven of release, 'set free', whatever that might mean?

And even in those seconds, and even as I wondered with anguish whether I would ever see her again, I lived with her in some angelic timeless world of quiet communication and absolute understanding.

Those were the tortures of the night. The tortures of the day consisted in pretending to eat, pretending to play, pretending to be happy, passing the hours, enduring the sympathetic looks and the loving remarks.

Terrible sadness, dread, an agonizing desire for happiness swelled in his heart.

Filthy lucre! Filthy lucre!" I could hear Sammy saying, with the voice of a man cursing the woman he has ruined.

Louise was a jewel locked away; and after the first 'if only' period had passed and Clement had got used to 'Mrs Anderson', he felt that his love for her had not faded, but had suffered a sea change into something special and unique, causing a special and unique and much valued, pain.