Quotes from Iris Murdoch

I may add here that one of the secrets of my happy life is that i have never made the mistake of learning to drive a car. I have never lacked people, usually women, longing to drive me withersoever I wanted. Why keep bitches and bark yourself?

It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.

What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice.

I am sorry, said Monty. I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.

The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.

thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you.

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.

He was glad that he had expressed to her, however blunderingly, what he felt. He was glad that he had held her hand.

But now more often the old stale hopeless weariness overcame him: the black sickness which almost no one else , certainly not his nearest dearest friends, could understand at all . The idea of giving up the world, which had given him for a time so much life-energy, appeared now as a sort of fake suicide, a ghastly play-image of his death. This fatal falseness-of-heart was what perhaps Father Damien, on further acquaintance, had now seen in him.

He also wanted to destroy something, everything, perhaps himself.

I'm made for misery, misery, misery , I'm made to be destroyed !

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves.

Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.

His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.

Cuál es la diferencia que existe entre yo y estas pequeñas y humildes criaturas? La araña teje su tela, no puede hacer otra cosa. Yo tejo mi conciencia, esta charlatana compulsiva, esta voz vaga y errabunda que pronto enmudecerá. Pero todo es un sueño. La realidad es demasiado dura.

I've thought about nothing else but you.

I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.

I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.

Don't tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.

Why do I always have to be helping people . . . and getting no help myself?

But I live, I live , with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always.

But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.

Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false.