Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “You know when things get inside you and you can’t stop going round and round the same piece of misery.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

453. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

459. “What emotion had so invaded me? Fear? It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers. The naming of it is sometimes unimportant, sometimes crucial.”

— Iris Murdoch

460. “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

461. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

463. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

465. “Ordinary consciousness simply becomes pain.”

— Iris Murdoch

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “I’m just one long disappointment.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

471. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

473. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

476. “You can’t kiss me and vanish.”

— Iris Murdoch

477. “To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

479. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

481. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

485. “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

486. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me, you don’t know what it’s like to be all tattered and destroyed inside.”

— Iris Murdoch

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

490. “I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.”

— Iris Murdoch

491. “But the poem was a Liebestod and although art cannot but console for what it weeps over, the completion of the poem left him sour and sick and utterly convinced of the henceforward impossibility of love.”

— Iris Murdoch

492. “I’m totally unworthy of this love which you are offering to me.”

— Iris Murdoch

493. “It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

495. “There are secret saints with strange destinies.”

— 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. “The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.”

— Iris Murdoch

498. “I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— 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