Quotes from Iris Murdoch

A versatile Bohemianism had rendered him classless.

She had made some sort of life-mistake which meant that everything would grow worse and never better.

Sham dead,' I said. 'Dead! Dead dog!' I hoped that this word was in his vocabulary. It was. In a moment Mars's legs sagged and his body became limp and he slid to the ground, his eyes turning back and his mouth hanging open. It was terribly convincing. I was quite upset.

I want to have things clear,' I said. 'You're offering me a sinecure.' 'I'm not sure what that is,' said Madge, 'but I expect it's that.' 'A sinecure is when you get money for doing nothing,' I said. 'But isn't that exactly what you've always wanted?' said Madge.

He was conscious of his body as a heavy cold horrible container. He had the feeling, coming to him as the memory of a dream, of being a prisoner waiting to be tortured. The extremity of pain was yet to come. And even now he was denied to comfort of self-pitying misery and warm tears.

It's all someone else's secret.

There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them. It is the hearing of an unheard sound.

Actually, said Gildas, every marriage is an irreversible mistake. That's the secret which they all keep.

Even Wittgenstein did not think that we would ever reach the moon.

Life is horrible, horrible, horrible, said the philosopher.

He was capable of hurting Ludens even to the point sometimes of deliberate malice.

There's only one thing the matter and that's everything.

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.

In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

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

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

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.