Top Iris Murdoch Quotes

We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.

The agony was of suddenly feeling herself so separate and so secret.

I'm not interested. I never liked him. He's some sort scoundrel.

I'm not like other people, my life just doesn't work, it never has.

How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.

One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It's none of our business.

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.

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.

Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.

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 commo...

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

Si se entiende por eternidad, no la duración temporal sin fin, sino la ausencia de tiempo, vive eternamente el que vive en el presente.

I've been so unhappy for years, so unhappy . . . I don't understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

Only stories and magic really endure.

Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

In a century or two this planet will have been destroyed by external cosmic forces or by the senseless activity of the human race. Human life is a freak phenomenon, soon to be blotted out. That is a c...

Give yourself to these great works of art. They suffice for a lifetime.

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 t...

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

The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing table can be a terrible thing.