Iris Murdoch Quotes

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

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a...

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies de...

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, cast...

While the light remains,' said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, 'only do not for...

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passion...

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It ca...

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affec...

There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing ...

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasin...

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. Th...

I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those...

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

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

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo t...

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready ...

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surrounding...

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon b...

The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out o...

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accur...

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to th...

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such...

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers...

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take s...

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and livel...

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with ...

Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – ...

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

We can only learn to love by loving.

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

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and d...

there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart

Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely ...

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an ed...

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a cont...

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitt...

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years withou...

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

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in h...

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling crippling panic. She was very frightened at the idea of...

I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with...

To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, g...

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will imp...

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the ...

There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made m...

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I hav...

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a sup...

It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man wh...

... male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a ...

I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present m...

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge ...

Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--''Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem ...

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to ...

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of non...

Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in...

Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveri...

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn t...

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding...

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the pro...