Quotes from Iris Murdoch

What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

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.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.

I have nobody in the world. I'll kill myself. That's best. Everyone will say, It's for the best that she killed herself, she's better off dead . . . I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it . . .

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.

let us not waste love, it is rare enough

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship...

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

Time, like the sea, unties all knots.

I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')

How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.

Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day.

Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn't just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.