Top Iris Murdoch Quotes

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...

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

But the spark vanished, there was no longed-for recognition, no dawning sign of recovery. The love she had learnt in tending him was an enclosed love, muted and maimed, already mourning. They would ne...

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.

Your infatuation will end in tears.

I have no close friends, that is, no friends.

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...

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.

You talk of freedom — I've never had it! I've been lonely and miserable and in despair, and you want me to consent to all that all over again!

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.

Don't tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.

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.

There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When i...

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

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...

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

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

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

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.