Quotes from Iris Murdoch

The only consolation I had was buying things. If I bought some pretty thing it cheered me up for a while.

This thought was so heavy with despair that she almost began to cry again.

Misery and drink made him a sound sleeper.

I know time doesn't heal. That's the silliest idea of all.

Having a great phase of reading Dickens – gosh he is good – though so careless. But so beautifully funny – as well as other things. Oh to achieve the purely funny! Where does it reside?

Mortality itself was my philosophical robe.

Love, yes. But sometimes love must sacrifice itself in order to remain love.

Listen to the wind. It can blow dreadfully here. In the winter it blows so that it would drive you mad. It blows day after day, and one becomes so restless. What do you think of my page? Your - Mr. Nolan? He seems very devoted. I think he would let me kill him slowly.

Is it true that the first time of falling in love is the worst? No.

I am not a neurotic! You're trembling with nerves and sensibility— Of course I am, I'm an artist!

They had become, year by year, month by month, mysterious to her, her love for them an extended pain, a web or field of force, of which she felt at times the almost breaking tension.

I can browse indefinitely in a stationer's shop, indeed there is hardly anything in a good stationer's which I do not like and want.

It is unjust, it is so unjust, was her thought. I have never been recognized as myself.

Of course you don't know yourself, lucky old you. I just know myself too bloody well.

Do you think she'll change? Hope nothing. Is there a cure? Only art. Or more love. I should die of more love.

Louise thought, what will happen to them — perhaps just this is the beginning of some awful end.

His peace depends on seeing me as unattainable, as an angel. It will hurt terribly when it turns out that I am only a woman after all.

Little pictures out of hell.

I have never been more sane, coldly sane, self-interestedly sane. I am a woman.

Bereavement is my occupation and it absorbs me completely. You want me to touch you, to look at you with sympathy. I cannot.

Franca, darling, let's be simple. And move quietly in the dark.

éclat. Sadie had éclat; or so the public thought, though personally

Les esprits aiment la nuit, qui sait plus qu'une femme donner une âme à toutes choses.

The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it.