Top Iris Murdoch Quotes

There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage.

Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible.That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave.There is one that will drown me.

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...

Your infatuation will end in tears.

I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying arou...

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...

One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.

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

You can't magic yourself out of the situation, you've got to live it as decently and as grimly as you can.

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

Bellamy found simply a task of amazing difficulty. It was as if ordinary human life were a mobile machine full of holes, crannies, spaces, apertures, fissures, cavities, lairs, into one of which Bell...

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.

So was she on the side of dragons and indifferent to the fate of princesses?

I am, I must confess, an obsessive and superstitious letter-writer. When I am troubled I will write any long letter rather than make a telephone call. This is perhaps because I invest letters with mag...

Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.

Let me sleep at last. I've had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I've had misery enough in my life.

I adore your jealousy, especially when it's so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.

Sometimes I feel I am crammed with demons.

We shall meet, but as strangers. It is the end of an era. A whole part of my life is torn away.