Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...

Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I'm still me, that's hell. Well, get out of hell then! The gate's open and I'm holding it! I can't. I'm hell, myself.

Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that's why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that's what I am experiencing right now.

Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.

white magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.

I don't think I can marry, I'm not fit for it, I'm not real enough. That's the trouble. I'm a puppet that's realised what's wrong with itself and it's horrible . I'm propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I'm propped up crying in a corner.

Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.

And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.

he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Si se entiende por eternidad, no la duración temporal sin fin, sino la ausencia de tiempo, vive eternamente el que vive en el presente.

She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.

Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

The chief requirement of the good life', said Michael, 'is that one should have some conception of one's capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has. ... One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles.

I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.

Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.

One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It's none of our business.

I am beginning to ramble. It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.