Quotes About Iris Murdoch

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

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

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 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.

I might say too that you are the person who ought to help me, since you do bear some responsibility for having awakened in me such an immense, such a truly monstrous degree of love.

Then the front doorbell (already too long delayed by my rambling narrative) rang.

The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.

Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.' 'Yours is a melancholy sort of religion, Dennis. I'm afraid I don't believe in God.' 'Ah, you do. But you do not know His name. And I who know His name am only the better of you by one little word. Here is the salmon pool.

This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence. It's not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was.

The place was still there, present in the sunshine, instead of being hidden far away in darkness in the confines of some tragic opera.

He wanted to be a universal man . . . and I suppose that isn't possible now. He belongs in fifteenth-century Italy. This age doesn't suit him.

Of course we have an 'unconscious mind' and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a 'scientific' one.

You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.

This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch's fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.

Clement held her hand for a moment; knowing that after that moment the darkness would begin.

Look Moy, see the chimneys, they've lit all the fires, they must have known we were going to try to drown ourselves. And Anax is running on ahead to bring the news.

We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

I have never lived in Ireland, though I retain a sentimental sense of connexion with that poor bitch of a country.

You understand nothing of—the horror—no wonder you can't write real books—you don't see—the horror—

She committed her energies to the Labour Party in 1944 but expressed disappointment with its leaders, complaining to David Hicks in May of 'the usual lack of unity and intelligent leadership on the left'. To her surprise and delight, however, the Labour Party swept to victory in July 1945.

You are heroic, Mr. Lynch-Gibbon. The knight of infinite humiliation. One does not know whether to kiss your feet or to recommend that you have a good analysis. She said it as one might say a good thrashing.

The sea, the sea, yes,' James went on. 'Did you know that Plato was descended from Poseidon on his father's side? Do you have porpoises, seals?' 'There are seals, I'm told. I haven't seen any.

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.

Po?i auzi marea? - ?sta era citatul favorit din Shakespeare, a lui Keats.