Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I did love her in a way, but it was under the sign of doom.”

— Iris Murdoch

452. “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

453. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

455. “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

456. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

459. “Ordinary consciousness simply becomes pain.”

— Iris Murdoch

460. “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 He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.”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

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

— Iris Murdoch

462. “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

463. “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

464. “Charles, don’t destroy yourself,” said James. “Why are you always so intent on breaking everything that surrounds and supports you?”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

466. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

469. “You can’t kiss me and vanish.”

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— 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. “Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one’s first love?”

— Iris Murdoch

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

483. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— 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. “I’ve felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

490. “It was too late to go back. There was a hand which could never, in grace and healing, be laid upon him now.”

— Iris Murdoch

491. “Where do they come from, these tears?”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

493. “Village life can be terribly unpeaceful!”

— Iris Murdoch

494. “Comenzar una novela es como abrir la puerta o un paisaje neblinoso; ves muy poco, pero hueles la tierra y sientes el soplo del viento.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

496. “I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way.”

— Iris Murdoch

497. “The calmness was the final tone of despair.”

— 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. “A really malicious letter should be read once only and destroyed, or best of all not read at all. These things lodge in the mind.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch