Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Talk to him about more ordinary things. It'll take a bit of time.' 'There isn't much time left, my dear. And no ordinary things. Only last things.

we have futures. That means we can make things true…

Shall I come too? said Francis. I might be useful. After all, I am still a doctor in the eyes of God.

And all the time the line of force which bound her to her husband stretched and vibrated so that her heart in secret haemorrhage, gushed blood.

Was it here, after all, that everything broke down and descended into a roaring shaft of shattered masks and crumpled rose petals and bloody feathers?

He had trimmed his moustache into a Hitlerian toothbrush.

Because of what you have done things will happen later which can't possibly be foreseen.

I must stay with you, stay near you, do your will, or die.

Uno de los secretos de una vida feliz es la continuidad de los pequeños placeres, y si algunos pueden ser baratos y conseguidos sin demora, tanto mejor.

She said she sometimes worked as an usherette in the cinema, and she had seemed to him like a nymph of the cinema age, a sybil of the cavern of illusory love.

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.

For the moment however behold me sitting with Priscilla and Francis. A domestic interior. It is about ten o'clock in the evening and the curtains are drawn.

The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing table can be a terrible thing.

She did not understand music and it upset her, it had only sad, tragic things to say. These leaping forms, these pursuits and insistences, these elusive desperate repetitions, always seemed to her like one long cry of agony. She could not, in this company, allow herself the luxury of self-pitying tears, which was her highest tribute to the art. She looked about her and let the music gather to her the people with whom she was so deeply concerned.

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.

In October 2014 files released from the National Archives revealed that MI5 'opened personal files on the popular historian A. J. P. Taylor, the writer Iris Murdoch and the moral philosopher Mary Warnock after they and [Christopher] Hill signed a letter supporting a march against the nuclear bomb in 1959'.

People may be settled into ways of life which preclude continued happiness, but which are satisfactory and far to be preferred to alternatives.

It had been his fate not to be interested in anything except everything.

Adelaide had anticipated pains and difficulties in her married life, and her anticipations were fulfilled.

politicians aren't concerned with justice being done, they're concerned with justice seeming to be done as a result of their keen-eyed vigilance.

Life can be sudden.

The easiest thing to think was that he was going to die. This was not exactly an intent to commit suicide, though he did consider suicide, it was rather a sense of the impossibility of surviving much longer, whatever he did, whatever he chose. He felt rent apart by an unremitting mental, felt as physical, strain. When he was alone he groaned aloud.

Society conspires to make a newly wed couple feel virtuous. Marriage is a symbol of goodness, though it is only a symbol.

A marriage is a very secret place.