Quotes from Iris Murdoch

There are people who occasion in one, as it seems automatically, obsessive egoistic anxiety and preoccupying resentment. When confronted with such people one should if possible run: or else deaden the mind to them. (Or behave in some 'saintly' manner not here relevant.)

She had not even framed the idea of happiness in connection with her marriage

Agamemnon was killed on his first night home from Troy. But Agamemnon was guilty, guilty.

The problems were too evident, they sat together eyeing them in silence. The stage now belonged to the young people, there would be happenings. Yet nothing happened; and Clement felt as if a magic spell had paralysed them all.

Moy thought, I shall make no more masks, something is over forever. Anyway, she thought, this time next year I shall probably be dead.

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.

Everything is full of gods, cousin James once said, quoting somebody.

Hand in hand the children began to run homeward through the soft warm drizzle.

You can't go through the looking-glass without getting cut. You know that now, don't you?

His love for Janie was not accessible to memory, he knew it only on evidence.

Nothing happened; yet there were disturbing signs and portents.

We think with our body, with its yearnings and its shrinkings and its ghostly walkings.

He felt irritably dissatisfied with himself. Then his old huge familiar misery gradually returned like an old friend.

This is perhaps the saddest experience in the demise of love and the most difficult for the imagination to encompass: to come to know that someone who loved you once now regards you as boring and annoying and unimportant. Sheer hatred might even be preferred to this.

Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm to no one. I cannot think of any tiny good things to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.

I felt blank dismay, instant fear for myself. I did not want to be involved in any mess of Priscilla's. I did not even want to have to be sorry for Priscilla.

I did not harbour intelligent doubts about whether Hartley would go on loving me, naturally I knew that she was mine forever. But as we closed our eyes upon tears of joy there was cosmic dread.

And she shivered with a dazzled joy.

It was too late to go to Gaze now, everyone would be in bed. It was a comforting thought. Whatever was happening it was not happening now. There was nothing he could do now. Sleep was overwhelming him again, great clouds and folds of sleep like a warm fog.

The television had been banished with its false sadnesses and its images of war. Perhaps he had nodded off over his book.

But no, she must be there, I felt, so charged with her presence was the image of that city which now rose up before me; and already in my mind I was walking with Anna along the Champs-Élysées, while the warm breeze of an eternal Parisian spring blew into our faces like drifting flowers the promises of a coming felicity.

Bradley, my marriage is over. I think my life is probably over. What a poor affair it has been.

Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusions, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points.

I have been struck down before my life begins. I have already died in the war.