Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...”

— Iris Murdoch

302. “I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.”

— Iris Murdoch

303. “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

304. “He felt as if something had been completed and he would never see any of those people again.”

— Iris Murdoch

305. “His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.”

— Iris Murdoch

306. “She thought, I am becoming a recluse. Yes, that’s it, that is the way.”

— Iris Murdoch

307. “Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.”

— Iris Murdoch

308. “The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.”

— Iris Murdoch

309. “He was glad that he had expressed to her, however blunderingly, what he felt. He was glad that he had held her hand.”

— Iris Murdoch

310. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

311. “We may love our chains and our stripes too.”

— Iris Murdoch

312. “I wonder if it’s harder to be good in this age?”

— Iris Murdoch

313. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

314. “But I’ve got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn’t understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I’m mangled in a machine. Even to say it’s my own fault doesn’t mean anything.”

— Iris Murdoch

315. “He did not touch her but enjoyed the particular intimate pain of the tension between them.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

317. “Ludens experienced, as an extra pain, an intimation of the happiness he might have felt in such a place.”

— Iris Murdoch

318. “She has somehow missed the bus of life.”

— Iris Murdoch

319. “She tells so many different stories and they are all false.”

— Iris Murdoch

320. “I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”

— Iris Murdoch

321. “I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie.”

— Iris Murdoch

322. “Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.”

— Iris Murdoch

323. “Oh what an ill fate it was that has made me love that man.”

— Iris Murdoch

324. “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!”

— Iris Murdoch

325. “The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing table can be a terrible thing.”

— Iris Murdoch

326. “It’s all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard.”

— Iris Murdoch

327. “Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent or come to doubt their own wit.”

— Iris Murdoch

328. “I accused Hartley of being a ‘fantasist’, or perhaps that was Titus’s word, but what a ‘fantasist’ I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.”

— Iris Murdoch

329. “Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.”

— Iris Murdoch

330. “Every artist is an unhappy lover.”

— Iris Murdoch

331. “I said, “Your brother is in bed with my wife.” I added, “I just took them up some wine in bed.”

— Iris Murdoch

332. “I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer.”

— Iris Murdoch

333. “You’ve got such nice hair, it seems a pity to dye it blue.”

— Iris Murdoch

334. “He felt sad, sad.”

— Iris Murdoch

335. “Magic besieges the religious life and men yearn to speak the language of angels.”

— Iris Murdoch

336. “I’m afraid you’re all mixed up in my mind,’ I said. ‘I wonder where they are now –’ ‘Married.’ She spoke it as if it were the name of a distant country.”

— Iris Murdoch

337. “Today we will read love poetry. You shall read aloud to me and we will weep together.”

— Iris Murdoch

338. “Patchway had the enviable countryman’s capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease.”

— Iris Murdoch

339. “I adore your jealousy, especially when it’s so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.”

— Iris Murdoch

340. “It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

341. “He is crammed full of rage and hate and desire for revenge.”

— Iris Murdoch

342. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

343. “What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.”

— Iris Murdoch

344. “This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...”

— Iris Murdoch

345. “However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.”

— Iris Murdoch

346. “Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.”

— Iris Murdoch

347. “And do stop sneezing. It annoys me so much when people sneeze.”

— Iris Murdoch

348. “Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.”

— Iris Murdoch

349. “How can we not be dooms to each other?”

— Iris Murdoch

350. “One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It’s none of our business.”

— Iris Murdoch