Top Iris Murdoch Quotes

You're doing your thing, why can't I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it.

How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?

Tell her I was young once and star-brightWho am now invisible . . .

I know people can be awful dooms for each other.

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.

She was a spoiler, a needler, an underminer, a diminisher, simply by instinct.

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...

I could not see other human beings at present.

Beyond her declaration of love she could not see. But as she rehearsed the intensity of her passion she thought that he , when the time came, . The desire to, at the right time, him became, as the ye...

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

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 . I'm propped up somewhere all alone, watching th...

I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a , now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art.

And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.

As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?

How fearful that dark shadow is when we catch sight of it in the life of another. No wonder those at whom that black arrow is aimed so often turn and flee. How unendurable it can be, the love another...

He felt himself falling into a state, very common when he was younger, of being totally cut off from the society he was in.

It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightm...

I did not like the look of him at all. Something significantly ill-omened which I could not yet define emanated from him.

I took him for a kind of buffoon. Now I see he is a devil.

And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it wi...