Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature.

Anywhere is dangerous if you carry danger with you.

Tal como nos conocemos, somos objetos falsos, imposturas, ramilletes de ilusiones" "Los juicios sobre las personas no son jamás decisivos, surgen de resúmenes que inmediatamente hacen pensar en la necesidad de una reconsideración. Los arreglos humanos no son otra cosa que cabos sueltos y cálculos nebulosos, independientemente de cualquier cosa que para consolarnos pueda fingir el arte

I have no close friends, that is, no friends.

I'll never be happy, how can you love me, I'm awful, I'm covered with spiders, I'm doomed .

What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.

male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.

Sometimes I feel I am crammed with demons.

It's not my fault! It can't make any difference, can it? You understand nothing. You are a destroyer, a black spiteful destroyer. You are the sort of person who goes around in a dream smashing things . . . You aren't really here at all.

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important

Your coldness has ruined my life. All right, you didn't mean it, all right I was a schoolgirl, but you could have been kinder to someone who said they loved you, you could have been gentle and grateful.

If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.

How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.

All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.

I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.

You've obviously never been in love. I have actually. And awfully . And—always—without hope—I've never had my love reciprocated ever.

Now, when she felt so deeply connected to him, they were finally estranged.

I'm not young. I've never had any youth.

She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.

What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?

They really wanted to remain always in their own house and their own garden. There are such people.

There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off.

Everything in his life now seemed to signal: too late.