“ I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow—I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go craw… Iris Murdoch
“ It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife. Iris Murdoch
“ 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? Iris Murdoch
“ 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. Iris Murdoch
“ Only take someone's hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever. Iris Murdoch
“ 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. Iris Murdoch
“ 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… Iris Murdoch
“ I did not like the look of him at all. Something significantly ill-omened which I could not yet define emanated from him. Iris Murdoch
“ 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… Iris Murdoch
“ 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… Iris Murdoch
“ 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. Iris Murdoch
