Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, forever.”

— Iris Murdoch

452. “I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling, I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness.”

— Iris Murdoch

453. “Clement held her hand for a moment; knowing that after that moment the darkness would begin.”

— Iris Murdoch

454. “And what is love anyway? Love’s all over the mountain where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it’s something you’ve invented now.”

— Iris Murdoch

455. “Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images’.”

— Iris Murdoch

456. “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 with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations.”

— Iris Murdoch

457. “I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart.”

— Iris Murdoch

458. “I’ve thought about nothing else but you.”

— Iris Murdoch

459. “You can’t imagine what it’s like when every moment you’re conscious you’re in the most frightful pain.”

— Iris Murdoch

460. “Anyway, as you say, what the hell. I know, I’ve been to hell, I’ve seen it, I’ve been shown round. I’ll kill myself. You’ll see, you’ll be sorry.”

— Iris Murdoch

461. “You know when things get inside you and you can’t stop going round and round the same piece of misery.”

— Iris Murdoch

462. “Their hands touched, their knees touched. They were both trembling.”

— Iris Murdoch

463. “I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.”

— Iris Murdoch

464. “Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation.”

— Iris Murdoch

465. “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 bears us. I would never persecute my darling with that dread knowledge. From now onward until the world ended everything must remain, although utterly changed, exactly as it was before.”

— Iris Murdoch

466. “There can scarcely be anything worse than surviving something which shatters your mind and leaves you obsessed with revenge.”

— Iris Murdoch

467. “We all live in the interstices of each other’s lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.”

— Iris Murdoch

468. “Filthy lucre! Filthy lucre!” I could hear Sammy saying, with the voice of a man cursing the woman he has ruined.”

— Iris Murdoch

469. “The whole thing, the way it all happened, was shattering. And what it shattered most of all was some conception I’d had of myself, some wholeness.”

— Iris Murdoch

470. “There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shoulder-shrugging casualness committed at last.”

— Iris Murdoch

471. “I did love her in a way, but it was under the sign of doom.”

— Iris Murdoch

472. “She thought, this is the end of happiness, darkness begins here.”

— Iris Murdoch

473. “Sometimes I think he will become quite desperate – with the pain of simply being himself – he might do anything.”

— Iris Murdoch

474. “This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart, was something I had not experienced with any other woman.”

— Iris Murdoch

475. “With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes consolation in the end.”

— Iris Murdoch

476. “You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.”

— Iris Murdoch

477. “You can’t kiss me and vanish.”

— Iris Murdoch

478. “I want to have things clear,’ I said. ‘You’re offering me a sinecure.’ ‘I’m not sure what that is,’ said Madge, ‘but I expect it’s that.’ ‘A sinecure is when you get money for doing nothing,’ I said. ‘But isn’t that exactly what you’ve always wanted?’ said Madge.”

— Iris Murdoch

479. “Sentimentally and in the soul it went on for ages, it still goes on, it goes on and on.”

— Iris Murdoch

480. “He did not consciously wish for death but he grieved at night for some blank thing which he could not even name.”

— Iris Murdoch

481. “Oh God, that conversation last night or this morning or whenever that devil-ridden scrap of nightmare had been. How could two rational beings go on and on simply saying the same awful things to each other week after week, month after month?”

— Iris Murdoch

482. “And could it be true without other awful things being true as well?”

— Iris Murdoch

483. “Lucas hated other people, and also hated himself.”

— Iris Murdoch

484. “I know her by intuition as if she were inside my head.”

— Iris Murdoch

485. “I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before.”

— Iris Murdoch

486. “I’ve somehow run myself into hell. There must be many entrances.”

— Iris Murdoch

487. “It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.”

— Iris Murdoch

488. “Yes, I’ve endured so much, and you seem to think this means I will endure anything. It does not.”

— Iris Murdoch

489. “Yes, my mother was on about Byron. But who wants to be like Byron? I despise him.”

— Iris Murdoch

490. “Are we not somehow compelled by love? I shall not let one day pass without giving you the assurance of mine. Surely there is a future for us together. I am yours yours yours.”

— Iris Murdoch

491. “How irrevocably spoilt, down to its minutest detail, his world was now. Even the countryside was spoilt, the animals, the birds, the flowers. There was nowhere to run to.”

— Iris Murdoch

492. “There are false suns, easier to gaze upon and far more comforting than the true one.”

— Iris Murdoch

493. “Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.”

— Iris Murdoch

494. “When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one.”

— Iris Murdoch

495. “Her solemn face of a Hebrew angel regarded me, ready, stripped of expression.”

— Iris Murdoch

496. “Here I am, after all, welcome home, I’m yours. To which Henry replied: When I wanted you you were not mine, when I needed you you rejected me. Why should I cherish you now?”

— Iris Murdoch

497. “We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.”

— Iris Murdoch

498. “But I had come to where I had never been before, the blessed point of sufficient desperation.”

— Iris Murdoch

499. “Everyone says how wonderful it is to be young. I’ve never seen it.”

— Iris Murdoch

500. “The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. The short path is the only path but it is very steep.”

— Iris Murdoch